Athenais by Lisa Hilton Read Free Book Online

humiliated and anxious. It seemed clearer than ever that the Montespans’ hopes of success and security were dependent upon her efforts at court, for which she needed the money Montespan was scattering casually over the gaming tables of Paris. Despite the salary she earned, the maintenance of her position required substantial expenditure, a fact which her boastful, hot-headed husband refused to take seriously. A second child, a son, was born on 5 September 1664, another source of anxiety for his mother. The baby, Louis-Antoine, Marquis d’Antin, would have no inheritance if his father’s extravagances continued. More immediately, a larger household was required for the expanded family. Montespan, it seemed, was condemning them all to embarrassing mediocrity, and Athénaïs’s Morte-mart blood revolted.
    Given the circumstances, it would have been understandable if Athénaïs had consoled herself with an affair — she certainly had plenty of admirers — but she continued to live a life of remarkable virtue at such a licentious court. Her decision to do so perhaps marks the beginning of her deliberate strategy to ensnare the King. Louis might tumble into bed with a woman whose reputation was less than spotless, as he did from time to time with Athénaïs’s sister, the Marquise de Thianges, but he would never make such a woman a serious mistress. It was at about this time that Athénaïs began to hope that this was what she would become. Just like Mme. de Thianges, Athénaïs was rather folle, crazy, in her belief that her good looks and nobility made her superior to other women, and Mme. de Caylus’s criticism of her elder sister — “she believed that her beauty and the perfection of her temperament arose from the difference which birth had made between her and the world in general” — would serve equally well as a description of Athénaïs. Modest she might appear, but as Athénaïs realized that her husband risked making her a proxy nonentity, her vanity, her sense of what was due to a Mortemart, began to fuel her every ambition. The King’s love might appease her wounded pride, and assuage her most commanding passion. “She does what she can,” remarked Louis of the beautiful Marquise around this time, “but I don’t want her.” Perhaps he protested too much, for during 1666 it became apparent that Louis wanted Athénaïs very badly, with a desire that even a King might fear.
    It was a momentous year for Louis. In January, his beloved mother, Anne of Austria, succumbed to breast cancer. Anne had been a formidable influence in her son’s life. While retaining the intense piety of her Madrid upbringing, she had proved herself both a patriotic Frenchwoman and an adept politician, saving the kingdom for her son during the wars of the Fronde. Louis’s birth had been the great joy of Anne’s life after twenty-three childless, hollow years with her indifferent husband. To Anne and to the nation, he had deserved his name of Dieu Donné, God-given: he was the answer to France’s anxious prayers for a Dauphin to secure the succession. The relationship between Louis and his mother was close, and they had an affectionate, natural manner with one another. Until Louis was nine years old, Anne heard his lessons, played with him and spanked him when he misbehaved. During the civil wars, she smuggled her children out of the Louvre in the night, wisely recognizing that the possession of the King’s person held the key to power, and their uncomfortable peregrinations, sometimes without the most basic necessities, forged a bond between mother and son that endured for the rest of her life.
    It was a horrible death. The doctors gouged holes in Anne’s cancerous breasts and inserted little pieces of meat into them to “nourish” the disease and prevent it from devouring her body. But there was little they could do to save her. Louis watched over her deathbed, until, as she faded, he collapsed and had to be carried from