Fouilloux, l'une des trois pucelles,
Comme elle est belle entre les belles,
Par ses attraits toujours vainqueurs,
Y faisait des rafles de cœurs.
Foucquet lost his heart to her. He spoke; he gained a hearing. Mademoiselle du Fouilloux, frivolous and calculating, was doubly made for him. Their liaison was intimate and political. Fouilloux was absolutely self-interested; she did not ask for what was her due, being too great a lady for that, but she demanded it by means of a third person, and even insisted upon advances. "I will tell you," wrote this go-between,[58] "that I have seen Fouilloux prepared to entreat me to find a way to inform you, as if on my own account, that I knew you would please her if you would advance one hundred pistoles on this year's pension."
We know also, from the same source, that the beauty asked for money to pay her debts, and did not pay them. Here is the end of the note: "Mademoiselle du Fouilloux has assured me that, of all the money that you have given her, she has not paid a halfpenny. She has gambled it all away." We must do justice to Foucquet, and to Fouilloux; they were very reasonable. Fouilloux's one thought was to have her own establishment, and she had her eye on an honest man, something of a simpleton, but of good family, whom she had watched by the Superintendent's police.
In those days the Queen's ladies-in-waiting were flattered in song. Fouilloux had verses addressed to her:
Foilloux sans songer à plaire
Plaît pourtant infiniment
Par un air libre et charmant.
C'est un dessein téméraire
Que d'attaquer sa rigueur.
Si j'eusse été sans affaires
La belle aurait eu mon cœur.[59]
Other verses celebrate Menneville:
Toute la Cour est éprise
De ces attraits glorieux
Dont vous enchantez les yeux,
Menneville; ma franchise
S'y devrait bien engager;
Mais mon cœur est place prise
Et vous n'y sauriez loger.
This Menneville, celebrated in such bad verse, was, with Fouilloux, the prettiest woman at Court. On this matter we have the testimony of Jean Racine, who, banished to the depths of the provinces, wrote to his friend La Fontaine, citing Fouilloux and Menneville as examples of beauty. "I cannot refrain from saying a word as to the beauties of this province.... There is not a village maiden, nor a cobbler's wife, who might not vie in beauty with the Fouilloux and the Mennevilles.... All the women here are dazzling, and they deck themselves out in a manner which is to them the most natural fashion in the world, and as for the attractions of their person,
Colors vents, corpus solidum et sued plenum."[60]
Of the two, Menneville is thought to have been the more beautiful. A song says of her: