The Love Life of Louis XIV: Mistresses and a Secret Marriage (1660-1715)

Louis XIV’s political marriage to the Infanta Marie-Thérèse of Austria, concluded in 1660 in the wake of the Treaty of the Pyrenees, never stopped the king from forming, in keeping with an already well-established tradition at the French court, a series of liaisons whose influence extended far beyond the private sphere. From the sentimental frenzy of his youth to the conjugal piety of his maturity, this love life followed a trajectory that accompanied, and at times steered, the religious and cultural evolution of the entire reign.

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👑 A Marriage of Convenience

Married on 9 June 1660 at the age of twenty-two, like the king, the Infanta Marie-Thérèse of Austria remained throughout her life an unassuming figure at court: pious, not particularly intellectual, never fully mastering French, she inspired in Saint-Simon the cruel nickname “Madame la Tristesse.” Of her six pregnancies, only the Grand Dauphin, born in 1661, survived. This passionless marriage, consistent with the dynastic customs of the age, left the king a sentimental freedom that court tradition, already exemplified by Henri IV, made socially acceptable so long as appearances were respected.

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💃 La Vallière and Montespan: the Favourites of the 1660s and 1670s

Louise de La Vallière, a lady-in-waiting the king met in 1661 at the age of seventeen, held first place in his heart for six years, bearing him four children, two of whom survived and were legitimised. Timid and little given to intrigue, she progressively gave way before the arrival of a more brilliant rival and eventually entered the Carmelite order in 1674, spending thirty-six years there in religious life until her death in 1710. Françoise-Athénaïs de Rochechouart de Mortemart, Marquise de Montespan, succeeded her from 1667 and dominated the king’s love life for twelve years, bearing him seven children, all legitimised: brilliant, ambitious and cultured, she shared, according to Saint-Simon, the king’s “taste for splendour and grandeur,” and exerted a real cultural influence by protecting artists such as Lully, Racine and Boileau. This relationship declined from 1679, under the combined effect of the Affair of the Poisons and the rise of a rival of an entirely new kind; the marquise finally withdrew from court in 1691. Meanwhile, the young Duchess of Fontanges, the last favourite in the traditional sense, had a brief affair with the king between 1679 and 1681, before dying prematurely at the age of twenty from complications of childbirth.

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🙏 The Turning Point of the 1680s

Several converging factors precipitated, at the turn of the 1680s, a profound transformation in the king’s romantic conduct. The Affair of the Poisons (1679-1682), an investigation into poisoning and sorcery that splashed as far as Madame de Montespan’s own entourage, cast a harsh light on the mores of the court and contributed to a kind of forced moral purification. The death of the Duchess of Fontanges in 1681, then that of Queen Marie-Thérèse on 30 July 1683 — an untreated abscess under her arm, which sincerely affected the king despite the coolness of their relationship —, finally cleared the way for a remarriage nothing now stood in the way of.

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💍 Madame de Maintenon: the Secret Marriage

Françoise d’Aubigné, widow of the burlesque poet Scarron and descended from a family of minor nobility once Protestant, had entered the royal circle as early as 1669 as governess to the illegitimate children of the king and of Madame de Montespan herself — an ironic situation that gradually brought her closer to the sovereign over the course of the 1670s. Having become his confidante and then his moral counsellor, she married Louis XIV in secret in the autumn of 1683, only months after the queen’s death, in an intimate ceremony whose morganatic nature forbade her from bearing the title of queen and whose secret was carefully kept until the king’s death. Pious, intelligent and discreet, Madame de Maintenon exerted a lasting influence on Louis XIV that reinforced his piety — the Jesuit confessor Father La Chaize, in office from 1675 to 1709, accompanied this same religious movement — and translated concretely into the founding of the Saint-Cyr school for impoverished young noblewomen. Madame de Sévigné summed up this shift of the entire court in a single phrase: “The king has become devout, and the court with him.”

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🧠 Key Takeaways

• Louis XIV’s marriage to Marie-Thérèse of Austria, concluded in 1660 to seal the Treaty of the Pyrenees, remained a marriage of convenience with no real bearing on the king’s love life.
• Louise de La Vallière (1661-1667) and then Madame de Montespan (1667-1679) successively held the position of chief favourite, the latter exerting a real influence on the reign’s cultural patronage.
• The Affair of the Poisons (1679-1682), which splashed Montespan’s entourage, precipitated a moral purification of the court that coincided with the queen’s death in 1683.
• Madame de Maintenon, former governess to the king’s illegitimate children, married Louis XIV in secret in the autumn of 1683, in a morganatic union never officially recognised.
• This union marked a lasting turn of the reign toward piety, illustrated by the founding of Saint-Cyr and by Madame de Sévigné’s remark: “The king has become devout, and the court with him.”