Athenais by Lisa Hilton Read Free Book Online Page A

the room. She was buried in the third-order habit of a nun, and her heart was placed in the church she had built to celebrate her son’s birth at Val de Grâce. Louis was deeply affected by his loss, but it was in a sense a liberation, as her increasing disapproval of the pleasures of his court had cast a pall over his enjoyment of them. Nevertheless he was devoted to her memory, and always held her up as his ideal of a queen.
    The following month, Athénaïs, too, lost her mother. Diane made a good Catholic death in Poitiers, far from her neglectful husband and his mistress. Athénaïs, too, may have experienced a feeling of sad release, for Diane’s religion, and her close friendship with Anne of Austria, may have acted as a check on her daughter’s ambitions. More than ever now, Athénaïs was alone in the world, with no one to rely on but herself.
    Freed from his mother’s restraining influence, Louis was able to make his affair with Louise de La Vallière fully public. Much to the fury of the long-duped Queen, Louise appeared officially at his side at Mass as soon as Anne’s body had been removed from the church. Unfortunately for Louise, the mystery that had added a piquancy to their relations was no longer necessary, and beneath the merciless gaze of the court she wilted like a nocturnal flower. As Louis’s confidence developed, he took more pleasure in the extravagant witticisms of court conversation, and Louise’s deficiencies as maîtresse en titre became more marked. She was embarrassed by the obligation to parade what she saw as her shame in public. Pregnant for the third time, she began to lose her timorous good looks, and she felt herself a poor match for the voracious beauties who surrounded her lover. Desperate for a means of retaining his attention, she turned to her old companion Athénaïs de Montespan.
    There is very little excuse for the duplicity with which Athénaïs cultivated the favorite’s friendship in order to get closer to the King. She willfully deceived Louise with assurances of affection; perhaps she listened with attentive sympathy as the simple girl poured out anxious confidences. Athénaïs was as ruthless as a general, and to her the conquest of Louise was no more than a necessary skirmish en route to her main encounter. There is no greater indication of Louise’s foolishness than her choice of such a friend to amuse the King. “Her conversation is so attractive,” recorded Mademoiselle. “La Vallière had little. If she had been more prudent, she would have looked for a woman in whom the beauty and charms of her person did not correspond to her wit.” 1 The Marquis de la Fare confirmed that Athénaïs did all she could to please the King, an easy task, in the presence of Louise, for a woman with wit. 2 Unlike her naïve undeclared rival, Athénaïs was prepared to fight her campaign “ avec bec et ongles. ” 3 Yet she played subtly. With consummate diplomatic skill, she had also won the good graces of the Queen, impressing her with hilarious anecdotes of how she virtuously rejected her numerous suitors. One courtier, the Comte de Lauzun, had had the impudence to suggest meaningfully that Athénaïs had not been “unkind” to him, and although Athénaïs turned the insult into a joke to amuse the Queen, she never entirely forgave Lauzun. Clearly, it would have been impolitic at this stage to annoy the King by succumbing to a lesser lover, and besides, Athénaïs’s vanity would have jibbed at the prospect of any man but Louis. She used her flirtations to pique his interest with precision. At the Hôtel d’Albret, Athénaïs had learned that esprit was the perfect aphrodisiac, and she knew, as Louise did not, that to make a man sigh with desire rather than boredom it was necessary to stimulate his uncertainty, alternating hope with severity, to confuse in order to beguile, to grant hope only in retreat, to create delight in despair.
    It was helpful that Louise was