History RaeTold

The Compelling Life of Madame de Montespan; or, How to Seduce a King using Nothing but your Wits, Looks, Social Standing, and by Sacrificing Some Babies

Back in the day, before the French Revolution with its beheadings and all that fun stuff, France was ruled by an absolute monarchy. This meant that a bunch of rich people married their cousins and got increasingly more inbred and mentally questionable and then made political decisions on behalf of the entire country and told everyone that this was their Divine Right and that God totally wanted this. Which we can’t PROVE is bullshit but frankly seems unlikely. BUT more interestingly, the royals also ate and drank a lot and built elaborate palaces and just fucked each other constantly, all the time, endlessly. AND THAT’S WHERE OUR STORY STARTS.

At this time, it was totally reasonable for a high-born woman to actively aspire to be the King’s mistress. This was an actual accepted career choice, and aside from having to bone an inbred lunatic whose toes were thumbs and whose brain was a bag of cats, the benefits were pretty excellent. You were kept in luxury, wanting for nothing, and got to hang out with interesting people who told you how hot you were while actively conspiring against you. Which is pretty much the dream. And there was one royal mistress who was infinitely better and cooler than all the other royal mistresses because she was so hot and talented and witty and also possibly a baby sacrificing, Satan-worshipping witch and murderer.

Just going to slip that witch thing in. We’ll get back to that later.

Francoise-Athenais de Rouchechouart de Mortemart, Marquise of Montespan was born into one of the oldest noble families in France, and was the official mistress of King Louis XIV, famous inbred lunatic. We’re going to call her Athenais, because that is FAR TOO MUCH NAME.

Now, Athenais was engaged to marry some other generic aristocrat, but then he got involved in a duel, as you do, and killed a guy, as you do, and so had to flee France to avoid arrest and instead our girl was hastily married off to the Marquis of Montespan, who was a dick.

Seriously, though. Fuck this guy. We’ll get to that too.

As a hot and interesting and clever woman who was, most importantly, born into an appropriate family, Athenais quickly carved herself a nice cushy place in the French court. From the descriptions of her online, I can gather that she was hilarious, super mean but in a fun, witty way, and an absolute fox with massive tits. There was a lot of emphasis on the massive tits. I will say that most of the descriptions of her were written by men.

Soon enough, Athenais began shagging the king. This was all a bit questionable, not because the king was married (the Divine Right of Kings apparently extends to the right to bang anyone you fancy at any time), but because Athenais herself was married. To a dick. So Louis set her up in a room next to his OTHER mistress’s room and would be like “NIGHT GUYS JUST OFF TO BANG MY TOTALLY UNMARRIED AND SOCIALLY ACCEPTABLE MISTRESS”, then enter his other mistress’s room, give her a wave and pop through to Athenais’ room to bone down. This went on for a while before people found out, at which point literally nobody did anything because he was the king, whose brain was a bag of cats, and could quite happily have anyone killed on a whim.

Nobody did anything, that is, apart from Athenais’ dick husband. Who was, as discussed, a dick. He couldn’t actually DO anything, because of the aforementioned whim-executions, but instead he went about being an arsehole to Athenais’ friends and telling anyone who would listen that he was going to have sex with a bunch of sex workers, contract syphilis and then rape his wife so that she would give the king syphilis. BECAUSE HE WAS A HUGE DICK. This obviously did not work out for him, what with threatening the king and all, and he was arrested and exiled to his pleasant country manor. Because then, as with any time in history, rich white men could get away with pretty much anything with very little consequence. Once in the countryside, he made all their children attend a fake funeral for their mother, because she was A WHORE who was DEAD TO THEM. Yep, yep, all perfectly normal behaviour, nothing to see here.

Such. A. Dick.

But enough about him. Athenais settled into a lovely cushy life, shagging the king and going to parties and being hilariously cutting about people and swanning around looking hot as hell. This kind of lifestyle was common for rich people of the time because nobody had a fucking job. She was given a full 20 rooms in Versailles, while the queen and actual wife of Louis XIV only had 14, and filled them with pets and flowers and a private gallery for some reason. She also had a bunch of kids by him, and stuck them on a farm or something so they wouldn’t get in the way of her bitching and shagging and partying lifestyle. 

But then, as was inevitable, Louis’ eye started to wander. He got bored of Athenais, and started banging a new mistress WHO THEN MYSTERIOUSLY DIED.

Full disclosure: she probably died of natural causes. But let’s not linger on that little nugget of buzzkill, because at this time in France there was a real-life scandal known as the Affaire des Poisons (or the Poison Affair, but in a French accent). Noble women around Paris, and the whole of Europe, were hiring professional poisoners to kill crap husbands and romantic rivals, because everybody was insane and nobody had anything better to be doing.

So rumours abounded that Athenais, when her lover started to stray, attempted to have him and his new bird poisoned. Look, it would be completely unreasonable to say that nobody was trying to poison Louis XIV, because fucking everybody was trying to kill fucking everybody else at this point, but we have no ACTUAL CONCRETE PROOF that one of those people was Athenais. It was likely a selection of people, including a maid and scorned lover whose child was never legitimised, another previous mistress who was implicated in the whole poison scandal, AND Athenais. Frankly it’s a miracle Louis lived as long as he did. Maybe that Divine Right shit was onto something.

Athenais was known to have regularly visited one of the professional poisoners, a woman known as La Voisin. La Voisin was a widow who made her living as a fortune teller, commissioned poisoner and possible witch. The belief at the time was that La Voisin and Athenais worked together to cast spells on the king in order to make him love her. One OUTSTANDING story claims that they prayed to Satan for the king’s love and then, as way of thanks, slit the throat of a newborn baby and stuck it in a blender (or 17th century French equivalent). Athenais then snuck bits of blended baby into the king’s food for YEARS to enchant him into loving her. Exactly how eating bits of mangled baby makes one fall in love is never fully explained in any of the court documents, but I’m 100% here for it. Bring me a baby and a NutriBullet and Kristen Stewart will finally love me.

Anyway, a search of La Voisin’s garden allegedly uncovered the remains of 2,500 babies, and while there’s zero actual evidence of this I am choosing to accept it as fact. 

Another story claimed that Athenais allowed La Voisin and a disgraced priest known only as Etienne Guibourg (because that was his name) to perform a black mass (a Satanic inverted mass) with her body as the altar, meaning they sacrificed some more babies and dripped baby blood over her naked body while praying to Satan, which is admittedly mental, but also METAL AS FUCK.

Sadly, La Voisin was eventually burned at the stake as a witch, because 17th century France was an inherently sexist society where all a woman needed to do to be branded a witch and burned alive was to be a little different, or voice too many opinions, or poison dozens of people and sacrifice two thousand babies to Satan.

Fuck the patriarchy.

This scandal tore Athenais and Louis apart (allegedly. Personally, I think he’d probably just got bored of this mad baby-killing witch woman and moved on to boning everyone else) and she left Paris and went to live in an abbey. Here, she got SUPER into charity work and the arts, which is a really wild about-turn from all that baby-sacrificing she’d been doing previously.

When she died, aged 67, presumably for some mental reason which I can’t be bothered to Google, the king forbade her children (who were also his children) from mourning her. Which is a bit of a dick move, sure, but she did get to have that fun passive-aggressive fake funeral when she first left her husband, so let’s not get greedy, shall we?