The divergent paths of the cousins' afterlives
The difference in the reputations, or afterlives, of the cousins is striking. Several factors can explain the discrepancy. The first, as I have noted, is that Antoinette later became the mistress of Duke Franqois II.
Breton chroniclers did not describe Antoinette favorably, and the relationship undoubtedly diminished her prestige, suggesting that she was motivated by greed rather than love.[353] In contrast, Agnes died at the heigh of her glory, adored by the king. Another factor is the Melun diptych, commissioned from painter Jean Fouquet by one of the executors of Agnes’s will and royal favorite Etienne Chevalier, whom we have just seen with Antoinette and the king at the chateau of Ville Dieu. This gorgeous Virgin with child depicted on the left panel of the diptych is said to bear the facial features of Agnes. The image has left an enduring impression of Agnes as both pure and erotic. No image at all memorializes Antoinette, much less a fabulous one like the Melun Virgin. Still another is that Charles VII never married Agnes to anyone, which might suggest a particularly deep affection; in the eyes of historians over the years, the “double” adultery of Antoinette and the king has been regarded as the more sinful of the two relationships.[354]In addition to these factors, as I have noted, the king fathered none of Antoinette’s children: two of her sons, Artus and Antoine, were fathered by Andre de Villequier, and two sons and two daughters by Duke Franqois II of Brittany.[355] The king recognized his three daughters by Agnes, and all were handsomely married. This matters because Agnes’s daughters and their families took the lead in shepherding Agnes’s positive image into future generations.
Some of the efforts taken by Agnes’s daughters’ families to manage Agnes’s reputation after her death remain visible today.
One of the most significant positive stories about Agnes is that she inspired the king to take up arms against in the English, which first appeared in the chivalric novel, the Jouvencel, written in about 1466 by father-in-law of Agnes’s daughter Jeanne. The story was elaborated over the centuries to make her the savior of France along with Joan of Arc. Another means of adorning Agnes’s reputation was depicting her as chastely resistant to the enamored king’s advances. A miniature in the Book of Hours of Marguerite de Coetivy, Agnes’s grand-daughter, makes the argument. The miniature shows King David leaning out the window of a structure that recalls the Sainte Chapelle to ogle a Bathsheba who has been associated with Agnes by James Kren.[356] Pointing out the resemblance between Marguerite’s Bathsheba and the Melun diptych, Kren speculates that in the eyes of Marguerite, the depiction “honoured the controversial Agnes’s position as object of royal desire.”[357] Assuming that the identification is valid, the Bathsheba miniature suggests that neither Agnes nor her family can be blamed for her surrender to the king; she simply responded to royal orders.The attitude of this Agnes-as-Bathsheba recalls that of her gisants, two magnificent tombs, one to contain her heart (no longer extant), the other her body (still standing in Loches), commissioned by the king. Both were decorated with gentle creatures like doves and lambs suggesting Agnes’s docility, modesty and obedience. The epitaphs on both tombs stressed Agnes’s charity toward the Church and the poor.[358] They also praised her administration of La Roqueceziere, Vernon, and Issoudun, describing her as “gentle in her words, soothing quarrels and scandals,” and, in a clear reference to the assumption of the Virgin, as ascending into heaven where she would take her place on a throne surrounded by saints.[359]
In addition, Antoinette, or one of her children, appears to have commissioned a series of frescoes depicting Agnes that once decorated the walls of the chateau de La Guerche.
Although no longer extant, the frescoes are detailed in a 1778 article in the periodical Bibliotheque universelle des romans on Agnes’s portrayal in histories of Charles VII.[360] According to the article, the frescoes traced the events of Agnes’s life, illustrating a “beautiful person” in the midst of “different ornaments and allegorical figures related to the different situations of her life.” One illustration drew on the familiar trope of innocent beauty modestly trying to dodge the attentions of a powerful lord. Agnes was shown discouraging the king’s advances, initially refusing a shower of royal gifts.[361] Although no record remains of the date that the frescoes were painted, Antoinette’s son Artus undertook major renovations on the chateau in the last years of the fifteenth century, which may be when he commissioned the images if they were not already there. Another striking sign of such care is noted by Rene-Louis de Voyer de Paulmy, Marquis d’Argenson, eighteenth-century owner of the chateau: Agnes’s “chiffre,” as he calls it, presumably A, which, along with the frescoes, was visible everywhere.[362]Besides Agnes’s family, Guillaume de Gouffier, favorite of the king and protector of Agnes, played a key role in safeguarding her reputation. Gouffier must have passed the story of Agnes on to his own son, Artus de Boisy, preceptor of Franpois I, who reigned 1515—47, and his grand maitre d’hotel, because the wife of this Artus collated an album of sketches of Franpois I’s living courtiers, including with them a sketch of the long-dead Agnes probably based on a sketch that Fouquet had done to prepare for the Melun diptych.[363] Franpois I’s mother Louise of Savoy then had her own album done, retaining Agnes’s sketch and bringing
Agnes Sorel and Antoinette de Maignelais: A star and a footnote | 107 her and her legend into the court of Francois I. The Melun diptych itself and the sketches spawned an industry of copies, one of which was still hanging in the chateau of Ugny-le-Gay in Picardy, seat of one branch of the Sorel family, as late as the late eighteenth century.
Another sign of family curation is the story of Agnes transmitted by Bernard de Girard, Seigneur du Haillan, named historiographer of the king under Charles IX.[364] The first time that Haillan treats Agnes, in De l'estat et succez des affaires de France of 1572, he has nothing positive to say about her, depicting her as distracting the king from his duties. But then something changed Haillan’s mind. For in the Histoire generale des roys de France, first published in 1576, Haillan supplements his earlier narrative to give Agnes a positive role, repeating and embellishing the legend of the young woman’s arousing the king’s sense of valor that we first saw being promoted by Agnes’s family, giving us the immortal scene that will remain central to her legend. Agnes told the king that when she had been a girl, an astrologer had told her that she would be loved by one of the most courageous and valorous kings in Christendom, but she now thought he could not have meant Charles VII, who was letting the English remain in France. The king began to cry but then went out chased the English from France.[365] Why the change? Haillan was appointed official historiographer of the king on the recommendation of Rene de Villequier, son of Artus de Villequier and therefore grandson of Antoinette. Rene would have been in a good position to pass along the legend after seeing his ancestor disparaged.[366]
As for Antoinette’s afterlife, after the few chronicle references that I have mentioned, in gallant literature of the seventeenth century she suddenly reappears as Agnes’s rival and even assassin, and, with the professionalization of history, she is absorbed in the histories of Charles VII as an immoral gold digger and political schemer.
To conclude, I would like to return to whether Antoinette was in fact the king’s mistress. The favor that the king showed her could just as well be one more example of his generosity toward Agnes’s relatives, which was extreme,[367]
and toward Andre Villequier and his family, which was equally so.77 True, as I have noted, three chroniclers describe Antoinette as succeeding Agnes as royal mistress.
But it is difficult to know if they were correct. Disapproving of Agnes, chroniclers reasoned that the presence of her cousin in a prominent position at court just after Agnes’s death must have meant that Antoinette too was the king’s mistress. A close examination of the other evidence shows almost nothing. The most significant of Charles VII's nineteenth-century biographers, Gaston du Fresne, Marquis de Beaucourt, cites as evidence of affair the fact that the king spent some time during the summer of Andre’s death in Preuilly and Pressigny, each about a ninety-minute walk from La Guerche. The conclusion that the king therefore spent the summer at La Guerche, consoling the widow (Beaucourt archly italicizes he word) and undoubtedly took her along with him to the chateau of Bridore, where he went next, is pure conjecture.I would propose that Antoinette may not actually have been the mistress of the king, in the way that we understand the term. I do not claim to be sure: I simply propose the possibility, for two reasons. First, both Antoinette and Charles VII had several children, but never with each other. Antoinette’s children were born during the short lifetime of her husband and during her long-term relationship with the Duke of Brittany. Between 1454 and about 1462 she bore no recorded children. Charles VII’s last recorded child was a premature baby who died with Agnes in 1450. Certainly this is not conclusive proof that there was no sexual relationship. It does seem odd, however, that two verifiably fertile individuals would have been intimately involved for some seven years without producing offspring. Second, Antoinette was a proponent of Agnes’s positive reputation, but neither she nor her family took steps to curate her own reputation. If Antoinette was not the king’s mistress they would have had no reason to do so. She would have had no idea that hundreds of years later her relationship with the king would be assumed to have been sexual and would have seen no reason to do damage control of the kind she performed in helping to curate the reputation of Agnes.
Lacking this reputational mitigation, Antoinette was easily slotted into the role of debauched counterpart of her cousin. Paradoxically, then, the lack of an intimate relationship between the king and Antoinette may be the ultimate cause of her vilification.298—300. Her brother Charles was part of the king’s household; brother Louis was a squire for the king; brother Jean, seigneur of Saint-Geran, was the Grand Huntsman of France.
77 Beaucourt, Histoire de Charles VII, 5: 59—64.
More paradoxical still, even though she may not have been intimately involved with the king, Antoinette, I suggest, was crucial to the development of the tradition of the French royal mistress. Whatever the reality of her relationship with Charles VII, she was taken by some contemporaries to be the king’s mistress and seems to have been recognized as politically influential. This has not served her reputation well. The Agnes/Antoinette binary, like its Marie/Eve counterpart, allowed the role of the royal mistress to be conceived of positively, anchoring the role in its positive guise to Agnes while pushing negative associations onto Antoinette. For the long-term effect of the binary I return to the narrative of the French royal mistress as it emerged in the nineteenth century, when Agnes and Antoinette became the two essential faces of the role: Agnes as the ideal that justifies or hides Antoinette, the political reality, or, put slightly differently, Agnes as the loving mistress persona giving cover to Antoinette, the political actor. Agnes and Antoinette, beautiful muse versus greedy opportunist, combined, offer a perfect standard for distinguishing the good mistress from the bad and promoting the good. For this reason, Antoinette’s role might be considered a sort of supplement to the role of royal mistress as realized by Agnes, who was typically assumed to have been little interested in politics. Antoinette might be seen as the active element required to complete the role; the cousins together add up to the French royal mistress of the later type.