Read Online Royal Romances: Titillating Tales of Passion and Power in the Palaces of Europe by Leslie Carroll - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Leslie Carroll
Ads: Link
father was an adulterer; among his numerous lovers was the celebrated courtesan Ninon de Lenclos. His philandering caused her honorable mother, Diane, considerable heartbreak. In 1653, the fifty-something duc de Mortemart abandoned his wife and children for a lover nearly twenty years his junior. Throughout her life Madame de Montespan felt tugged in competing directions. On the one hand there was her father’s worldliness and her own ambition to further herself at court; on the other, her mother’s piety and the desire to live virtuously. Both were legitimate aspects of her complex personality.
Athénaïs spent her childhood in the medieval castle of Lussac in the countryside of Poitou. At the age of twelve she followed her elder sister Gabrielle into the convent of Ste. Marie des Saintes, which, for a pretty price, educated the daughters of noblemen. There she studied the traditional (and surprisingly well-rounded) curriculum for aristocratic young ladies: sewing and embroidery, dancing, music, history, reading, writing, arithmetic, and geography. She was also taught to act, as it was assumed that all of these girls would be presented at court and would be expected to perform in the king’s ballets and masques. Additionally, Athénaïs became a rather good poet; many of the nasty verses that would later circulate through the gilded corridors of the royal châteaux came from her quills. She also learned to cook at Ste. Marie des Saintes, which served her in good stead during her royal romance, because Louis loved to eat and expected his paramours to have equally healthy appetites. Unfortunately forAthénaïs, corpulence ran in the Rochechouart de Mortemart genes. One of her cousins held the dubious distinction of being the fattest man at court.
The seventeenth century in France was known as the Grand Siècle —the Great Century—a flowering of wit and culture, the age of the playwrights Molière, Racine, and Corneille, of the architect Jules-Hardouin Mansart, the landscaper André Le Nôtre, and the composer Jean-Baptiste Lully. But every courtier was expected to be quick on his feet as well, literally a nimble and graceful dancer, but also ready with a quip or a bon mot. Here, too, Athénaïs excelled. Even the duc de Saint-Simon, one of her greatest detractors at court, acknowledged that Madame de Montespan had “the gift of saying things both amusing and singular, always original, and which no one expected, not even she herself as she said them.”
Athénaïs’s family was known for what they said as well as for how they uttered it—cutting remarks in high, cultivated voices and languid tones that Madame de Montespan’s daughters and even her ladies-in-waiting sought to imitate. However, there would come a time when courtiers would fear to walk beneath Athénaïs’s windows at Versailles. In the mid-1670s, when she presided over a suite of twenty rooms adjacent to the king’s, she delighted in delivering scathing critiques of each passerby for the amusement of her royal audience of one, who stood beside her, eager to hear every clever insult. “Going before the guns,” the courtiers called it.
As soon as she was presented at court, her family connections garnered Athénaïs a post as maid of honor to the new queen, Marie-Thérèse. As a courtier she was expected to participate in the ballets and other court diversions. In her maiden appearance she was cast in the ballet Hercule Amoreux opposite the Sun King himself. But it took some time before she’d catch his eye as anything other than a dance partner—for in 1661 Louis took his first maîtresse en titre , the meek and dewy Louise de La Vallière. Although it seemed that the Grand Monarch had zero interest in her, the ambitious Athénaïs bided her time. Unlike the vapid blond Louise, she had sex appeal and knew it.
In 1663, at the age of twenty-two, having spent two seasons inParis, Athénaïs became engaged. She was considered old for the era, as
Athénaïs spent her childhood in the medieval castle of Lussac in the countryside of Poitou. At the age of twelve she followed her elder sister Gabrielle into the convent of Ste. Marie des Saintes, which, for a pretty price, educated the daughters of noblemen. There she studied the traditional (and surprisingly well-rounded) curriculum for aristocratic young ladies: sewing and embroidery, dancing, music, history, reading, writing, arithmetic, and geography. She was also taught to act, as it was assumed that all of these girls would be presented at court and would be expected to perform in the king’s ballets and masques. Additionally, Athénaïs became a rather good poet; many of the nasty verses that would later circulate through the gilded corridors of the royal châteaux came from her quills. She also learned to cook at Ste. Marie des Saintes, which served her in good stead during her royal romance, because Louis loved to eat and expected his paramours to have equally healthy appetites. Unfortunately forAthénaïs, corpulence ran in the Rochechouart de Mortemart genes. One of her cousins held the dubious distinction of being the fattest man at court.
The seventeenth century in France was known as the Grand Siècle —the Great Century—a flowering of wit and culture, the age of the playwrights Molière, Racine, and Corneille, of the architect Jules-Hardouin Mansart, the landscaper André Le Nôtre, and the composer Jean-Baptiste Lully. But every courtier was expected to be quick on his feet as well, literally a nimble and graceful dancer, but also ready with a quip or a bon mot. Here, too, Athénaïs excelled. Even the duc de Saint-Simon, one of her greatest detractors at court, acknowledged that Madame de Montespan had “the gift of saying things both amusing and singular, always original, and which no one expected, not even she herself as she said them.”
Athénaïs’s family was known for what they said as well as for how they uttered it—cutting remarks in high, cultivated voices and languid tones that Madame de Montespan’s daughters and even her ladies-in-waiting sought to imitate. However, there would come a time when courtiers would fear to walk beneath Athénaïs’s windows at Versailles. In the mid-1670s, when she presided over a suite of twenty rooms adjacent to the king’s, she delighted in delivering scathing critiques of each passerby for the amusement of her royal audience of one, who stood beside her, eager to hear every clever insult. “Going before the guns,” the courtiers called it.
As soon as she was presented at court, her family connections garnered Athénaïs a post as maid of honor to the new queen, Marie-Thérèse. As a courtier she was expected to participate in the ballets and other court diversions. In her maiden appearance she was cast in the ballet Hercule Amoreux opposite the Sun King himself. But it took some time before she’d catch his eye as anything other than a dance partner—for in 1661 Louis took his first maîtresse en titre , the meek and dewy Louise de La Vallière. Although it seemed that the Grand Monarch had zero interest in her, the ambitious Athénaïs bided her time. Unlike the vapid blond Louise, she had sex appeal and knew it.
In 1663, at the age of twenty-two, having spent two seasons inParis, Athénaïs became engaged. She was considered old for the era, as
Similar Books
