sansaregina:HISTORY MEME | ten women: françoise-athénaïs de rochechouart de mortemart, marquise de m
sansaregina:HISTORY MEME | ten women: françoise-athénaïs de rochechouart de mortemart, marquise de montespan“But Athénaïs was far, far more than a mere beauty, of whom there were, after all, large numbers at Versailles. She was high-spirited and amusing, with a special kind of drollery known as ‘the wit of the Mortemarts’ which her family made famous. There were catchwords which baffled the uninitiated: Bourguignon for example stood for everything dull and dreary, Duc to one sister’s dislike of her husband’s Burgundian estates. A judgement would be delivered by a Mortemart with seeming innocence, even naïvety, what Saint-Simon called a ‘witty languishing manner’, and yet in its own way it would be quite devastating. And certainly where Athénaïs was concerned, this lovely rose had thorns: later courtiers would dread passing under her windows at Versailles for fear of the comments she might make. Madeleine de Scudéry had commended elegant mockery as the consummate social weapon in an essay ‘Of Raillery’. ‘To mock well,’ she wrote in 1653, ‘you must have a fiery intelligence, delicate judgement and a memory full of a thousand different things to use on different occasions.’ All this was possessed by Athénaïs.” – Antonia Fraser, Love and Louis XIV: The Women in the Life of the Sun King // natalie dormer as athenais de montespan -- source link
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