Undercover Queen By CAROLINE WEBER

Undercover Queen By CAROLINE WEBER*, BOOK REVIEW

THE SECRET WIFE OF LOUIS XIV
Françoise d’Aubigné, Madame de Maintenon
By Veronica Buckley
Illustrated. 498 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $35

“Kings,” Louis XIV once observed, “should enjoy giving pleasure” — and when it came to the fairer sex, he obeyed this precept zealously and often. “They’re all good enough for him, provided they’re women,” his sister-in-law remarked, “peasants, gardeners’ daughters, chambermaids, ladies of quality”; women of every stripe benefited from the Sun King’s sexual largesse. Neither the bonds of matrimony (to the sad, neglected Marie-Thérèse of Spain) nor the intrigues of his “official” mistresses (one of whom, Athénaïs de Montespan, wasn’t above spreading the rumor that a particular rival had scabs all over her body) could deter him from sharing the love.
But the prospect of eternal damnation was, to a Catholic sovereign, a rather more forceful deterrent. As Louis aged — afflicted by chronic tooth decay, a prostate tumor and a nasty case of gout — he worried that his adultery might cost him the kingdom of heaven. Eventually and paradoxically, this concern propelled him into a liaison with the morally exacting, middle-aged Françoise d’Aubigné, Marquise de Maintenon. To the astonishment of the court, accustomed to a monarch whose tastes ran more to pulchritude than to piety, she exerted such influence over him in his final years that once he was a widower he even, despite her shameful origins as a convicted felon’s daughter, deigned to wed her (albeit secretly). In his well-known chronicle of Louis XIV’s reign, the Duc de Saint-Simon demonized Madame de Maintenon as a ruthless schemer whose devoutness was a ruse, devised solely to exploit her lover’s fear of sin. While likewise revealing that her faith was a matter of strategy rather than of substance, “The Secret Wife of Louis XIV: Françoise d’Aubigné, Madame de Maintenon,” by Veronica Buckley, offers a lively, sympathetic portrayal of the woman who, against all odds, succeeded in taming the royal tomcat.
By the standards of the caste-bound, honor-obsessed ancien régime, Françoise d’Aubigné’s beginnings were anything but auspicious. Born in prison in 1635, Françoise belonged to the minor nobility. But thanks to her blackguard of a father, Constant d’Aubigné, she and her two brothers — the fruit of his union with Jeanne de Cardilhac, his jailer’s daughter — were deprived of the respect and status that their fellow aristocrats usually commanded. In addition to killing a man in a duel, Constant’s long list of crimes included gambling, counterfeiting, abducting a woman and participating in a failed rebellion against the throne. Appalled by these transgressions, Constant’s father — the celebrated soldier and poet Agrippa d’Aubigné — disinherited him, making the younger d’Aubignés paupers as well as outcasts. After a royal pardon ended his imprisonment in 1643, Constant took his brood to the West Indies to seek his fortune, an enterprise that ended with his mysterious disappearance four years later. With no money and no options, Jeanne and the children returned to France, where they were reduced to begging on the street for alms and bread.
Only in the context of such desperate circumstances could salvation assume the form of a deformed, wheelchair-bound, almost surely impotent husband 25 years d’Aubigné’s senior: Paul Scarron, whom she met in Paris when she was 15. Scarron’s appearance was so grotesque that d’Aubigné, upon seeing him for the first time, burst into tears. (The man himself was used to such reactions, admitting wryly: “My body, it’s true, is most irregular. Pregnant women aren’t even allowed to look at me.”) Still, for d’Aubigné, marriage to Scarron represented deliverance from a lifetime of continued impoverishment and social humiliation. Better yet, Scarron happened to be a renowned man of letters, whose Paris salon was, as one contemporary noted, “the meeting place for all the most cultured people from the court, and all the clever people in Paris.” In this rarefied, socially competitive milieu, d’Aubigné soon realized that if she wanted to shine (and she was too ambitious not to want to), she would have to distinguish herself from the crowd. By age 18, she hit upon the method that was to serve her in good stead for the rest of her life: a cultivated air of modesty, kindness and quiet religious fervor that contrasted starkly with the dissolution and frivolity of the fashionable set.
After Scarron’s death in 1660, d’Aubigné continued to frequent Paris’s leading salons. Among the many dignitaries she befriended there was Athénaïs, Marquise de Montespan — the “woman who,” Buckley writes, “unwittingly and, as it turned out, to her own grave disadvantage, was to facilitate the Widow Scarron’s rise from pretty salonnière bourgeoise to the greatest lady in France.” But in the early years of their friendship, it was Montespan, not d’Aubigné, who seemed to hold all the cards. As a scion of the noble Mortemart family (a clan whose reputation for sparkling wit, l’esprit Mortemart, Proust was later to celebrate in “Remembrance of Things Past”), Montespan enjoyed a privileged position as one of Queen Marie-Thérèse’s ladies-in-waiting at court. A gorgeous, blue-eyed blonde with a voluptuous figure, an infectious laugh and the famous Mortemart sense of humor, Montespan made herself the center of attention in just about any gathering — even (or especially) those that included the lusty young Louis XIV. Predictably, the king fell for her, and she became his favorite mistress. This distinction meant riches and prestige beyond measure — two things that d’Aubigné, for all her popularity on the salon circuit, had no reason to expect for herself.
The tables turned, however, once Montespan began bearing Louis XIV’s children. Because she was married to another man, these offspring couldn’t comfortably be paraded around court. They had to be kept out of the public eye, and entrusted in the care of someone respectable, discreet and reliable. Montespan immediately thought of her old friend d’Aubigné, who accepted the post after the king himself enjoined her to take it. After that, the die was cast. As the sentimental legend (repeated here by Buckley) has it, the prim, pretty governess soon entranced her employer by loving his children as if they were her own. “She knows how to love,” Buckley quotes the monarch as saying. “It would be something to be loved by a woman like that.”
Of course, whatever Louis wanted, Louis got — and as, over time, what he wanted shifted from carnality to spiritual redemption, d’Aubigné was able to provide him with that too. In so doing, the onetime beggar girl became not just a morganatic queen, but an indispensable confidante to one of the most powerful men on earth. In charting this trajectory, Buckley, the author of “Christina, Queen of Sweden,” relies heavily on the same psychological presupposition one finds in Saint-Simon: that d’Aubigné’s overpowering need for respect, and her wildly successful pursuit of it, were fueled by memories of her wretched, degrading childhood. Unlike Saint-Simon, however, Buckley presents this idea with palpable compassion, imaginatively penetrating her subject’s inner­most thoughts to justify the historical record. “In her heart,” Buckley explains, implying that a biographer has privileged access to that most mysterious of human organs, “she felt entitled to be Queen.”

*Caroline Weber, a professor of French literature at Barnard College and Columbia University, is a frequent contributor to the Book Review.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/06/books/review/Weber-t.html?ref=books