At this time the journal of the health of the king, drawn up by D’Aquin, the chief physician, states that Louis suffered from violent headaches. Towards the end of this year, 1673, he was attacked by dizziness of such a kind that at times his sight became clouded and he felt on the point of collapse. ‘Is it rash,’ observes Monsieur Loiseleur very justly, ‘to see in these headaches and faintnesses the effect of powders provided by La Voisin?’ The hypothesis of Monsieur Loiseleur will be sustained in detail by a declaration of the magician Lesage which will be found below.
It remains to inquire how Madame de Montespan contrived to get the powders prepared by the sorceress into the food of the king, surrounded as he was by officers of the buttery. Two revelations, both of November 8, 1680, made, the first by Lemaire, locked up at Vincennes with the Abbé Guibourg, the second by Lesage, will give the indication we desire.
We read in the notes La Reynie took for his personal guidance by way of memoranda: ‘November 8, 1680, Lemaire asked to speak to me; told me that being in the same room with Guibourg and another man, Guibourg told them such strange things, especially in regard to Madame de Montespan, that he does not know what to make of it, and that if there was any officer who ought to be suspected, it would be Duchesne, the butler; that Duchesne was a footman in the house of Madame d’Aubray, that he has since served Monsieur Bontemps, and then Madame de Montespan, who was very kind to him, and made him officer of the buttery, and that he is always at Madame de Montespan’s service.’ Further: ‘From the last examinations of Lesage, and that of November 8 particularly, it appears that Gilot, also an officer of the buttery, was involved in the impious trade in 1668, and that he sought Lesage’s assistance for the designs of Madame de Montespan.’
The crisis of the year 1675 was more serious. Louis XIV suddenly had great fits of devotion. People with their eyes open saw that he was tiring of his mistress. Madame de Montespan, on the Thursday in Holy Week, had been refused absolution by a priest of her parish. Much put out, she hastened to the curé of Versailles, and spoke to him hotly, but the curé approved of his subordinate’s action. And the great voice of Bossuet, which had consistently been upraised against the double adultery, resounded with a new force. ‘When we were at Versailles, one fast day, about Easter, Madame de Montespan went away,’ writes Mademoiselle de Montpensier. ‘Every one was vastly astonished at this retreat. I went to Paris, and saw her in the house where her children were. Madame de Maintenon was with her. She saw nobody. As everybody was on the alert about her return, although nobody seemed to pay any attention to it, it was known that M. Bossuet, then tutor to the dauphin, and at present bishop of Meaux, went there every day muffled in a grey cloak.’ We have other information from Bossuet’s private secretary, the Abbé Le Dieu. Louis XIV ordered his mistress to retire. When Bossuet went to see the exiled lady, she ‘loaded him with reproaches; she told him that his pride had urged him to get her driven away, that he wanted to make himself sole master of the king’s mind.’ Then, when she understood that her wrath smote in vain against the serene firmness of the prelate, ‘she sought to win him by flatteries and promises; she dangled before his eyes the chief dignities in Church and State.’
This exile lasted from April 14 to May 11. On the other hand, the magician Lesage, in an examination held on November 16, 1680, declared that ‘if he were in the last torments, he could tell nothing except that in 1675, at the beginning of summer (the exact date), when Madame de Montespan was trying to maintain her position, La Voisin and La Desœillets worked or pretended to work for her; but in reality, powerless to keep for her the love of the king, they merely gave her powders which, taken in certain doses, would have acted as poison.’ So Lesage said; and the declarations of the girl Monvoisin, summed up by La Reynie, are identical: ‘The powders her mother sent to Madame de Montespan were love powders to be given to the king. Once when her mother took some powders to Clagny she was accompanied by the magician Latour, her eldest brother, a servant named Marie, since dead, and Fernand, a good friend of Latour, and La Vautier; but these did not enter Clagny. She could not say if Latour went in with her mother, but they all came back together, and had lunch at the sign of the Heaume, near the Bois de Boulogne, with violins; they made some noise among them. Her brother, who told her about it, told her that her mother brought back fifty louis-d’or. Her mother, besides the powders she gave to Madame de Montespan, did not send any except by Mademoiselle Desœillets, who was the go-between for that purpose. As to the powders which had passed beneath the chalice, they came from a priest called the Prior (the Abbé Guibourg). As to the others which had not been under the chalice, her mother kept them in the drawer of a cabinet of which she had the key. There were black ones, white, and grey, which she mixed in the presence of Desœillets. Her father once wanted to break the cabinet where the powders were kept, saying that some harm would come of it.’ And the result of these practices was, once more, of such a nature as to give confidence in the power of sorcery: Madame de Montespan regained her position with the king. It is true that Madame de Richelieu said, ‘I am always there as a third party.’ In spite of this ‘third party,’ Madame de Montespan became the mother of the Comte de Toulouse and Mademoiselle de Blois. Madame de Sévigné writes to her daughter on June 28, 1675: ‘Your idea about Quantova (Madame de Montespan) is very good; if she cannot recover the old ground, she will push her authority and her greatness beyond the clouds; but she must make sure of being loved all the year round without scruple. Meanwhile her house is filled with the whole court, and her consideration is unbounded.’ On July 31, Madame de Sévigné writes again: ‘The attachment for Quantova is always extreme: it’s pretty much in order to vex the curé and everybody else.’
In 1675 Madame de Montespan had been dismissed, from religious scruples; in 1676 she was to be sent away for reasons which furnished her with quite another ground for irritation. The king was then suddenly seized with a terrible hunger for a multiplicity of amours, soon over, sudden, and varied. Madame de Sévigné characterises this strange condition in a picturesque phrase: ‘There’s a scent of new game in the land of Quanto.'[11] At short intervals the Princess de Soubise, Madame de Louvigny, Mademoiselle de Rochefort-Théobon, Madame de Ludres, and no doubt others, succeeded one another in the affections and the bed of the king.
Madame de Soubise makes an amusing appearance in the gallery of royal mistresses. She loved Louis out of love for her husband. After collecting for him all the honours and dignities, the offices and the hard cash that he desired, Madame de Soubise struck her tents and retired in good order. She had made the least possible stir and went back to her husband, who was enchanted with the adventure. The Prince of Soubise thought, with the poet, that a share with Jupiter had no dishonour so long as Jupiter could pay a good price.
These intrigues find a double echo, in the writings of Madame de Sévigné and in the records of the Chambre Ardente. On September 2, 1676, Madame de Sévigné writes: ‘The vision of Madame de Soubise has passed quicker than a lightning-flash: they have made it up again. Quanto the other day at cards had her head resting familiarly on her friend’s shoulder, and we fancied that piece of affectation meant “I am better than ever.”’ But on September 11 the position has changed. ‘Everybody believes that the star of Madame de Montespan is paling. There are tears, unfeigned disappointments, affected cheerfulness, sulks; at last, my dear, it is all over. Some tremble, others rejoice, some wish for immutability, the majority for a dramatic change; in a word, we are all eyes and ears for what the most clear-sighted say.’ ‘Every one thinks that the king loves her no longer,’ we read in a letter of September 30, ‘and that Madame de Montespan is embarrassed between the consequences which would follow the return of his favours and the danger of no longer enjoying them—the fear that they are being sought elsewhere. Apart from that, she has not very nicely accepted the position of friend: so much beauty as she still has, and so much pride, find it difficult to come down to second place. Jealousies are keen. Have they ever stopped anything?’ Again, on October 15, 1676: ‘If Quanto had packed up her traps at Easter the year she returned to Paris, she would not have been in her present distress; it would have been sensible to adopt that course, but human weakness is great; one wishes to make the most of the remains of one’s beauty, and this economy brings ruin rather than riches.’ Madame de Ludres had just succeeded Madame de Soubise.
The anxieties of Madame de Montespan were further enhanced by the brilliance, increasing every day, of a new star in the sky of Versailles. At its rising it had shed a pale, discreet, modest light, but a light which twinkled with little mocking scintillations. The widow Scarron, now become Madame de Maintenon, had been chosen as governess of the children of the king and Madame de Montespan. What strides the governess’s fortune had taken in a few years! ‘But let us speak of the friend’ (Madame de Maintenon), writes Madame de Sévigné on May 6, 1676: ‘she is still more triumphant than the Montespan. Everything is submitted to her dominion. All the chamber-women of her neighbour are hers: one hands her the rouge-pot on her knees; another brings her her gloves; a third puts her to sleep; she salutes no one, and I fancy that really she laughs in her sleeve at this servitude.’
Madame de Sévigné thus tells us what was passing at court; Marguerite Monvoisin will tell us what was going on among the sorceresses. ‘The daughter of La Voisin,’ writes La Reynie, ‘says that she has seen this sort of mass celebrated over the body by Guibourg in her mother’s house. She helped her mother to get things ready: a mattress on seats, two stools at the sides, on which were candlesticks with candles; after which Guibourg came out of the little side-chamber clothed in his chasuble—white, spotted with black fir-cones—and after that La Voisin brought in the woman on whose body the mass was to be said. Madame de Montespan had this sort of mass said three years ago (i.e. in 1676) at her mother’s house, where she came about ten o’clock and only left at midnight. And when La Voisin told her that it was necessary for her to fix a time when the other two masses might be said, which were necessary if her affair was to be successful, Madame de Montespan said that she could not find time, that La Voisin would have to do what was necessary to assure success, which she promised her and did, and the masses were said on La Voisin herself by Guibourg.’ (This again shows the sincerity of the sorceress in the carrying out of these practices.) ‘The girl Voisin having notified all the circumstances of the proceeding, the arrangement of the place, that of the person—she knew Madame de Montespan—the preparations of the priest clothed in his sacerdotal vestments, the terms of the incantation, in which the documents show that the names of Louis de Bourbon and Madame de Montespan were mentioned—the girl Voisin adds that a child had its throat cut at the mass said for Madame de Montespan at her mother’s.’