The tradition of the politically influential French royal mistress acquired its shape over the course of the nineteenth century, when historians, popular and scholarly, created a narrative of French singularity from the perception—and the reality— that the kings of France had often taken political advice from women to whom they were not related.1
Defining female “favorites” in France as “royal mistresses who had some influence over the events and men of their time,” Pierre Larousse’s popular Grand Dictionnaire Universel du XIXe Siecle, published in 1872, goes on to note that “although the history of Spain and that of England also offer many traces of feminine influence in the affairs of State and some rather scandalous examples, it was chiefly in France that there were favorites, veritable shadow queens (‘reines de la main gauche’).”[292] [293] If Larousse’s dictionary as a whole is not especially flattering about shadow queens, other sources of the same period present the tradition as a source of pride, dovetailing it with a developing version of French nationalism for which gallantry, that is, a style of interaction between the sexes based on effervescent conversation and gender complementarity, represented a central value.[294] In this context, the legend of Agnes Sorel (ca. If Agnes is idealized in nineteenth-century accounts as the beautiful, selfless, embodiment of soft power, the reason is at least in part because she lived before resident ambassadors became a fixture of court life, sending detailed missives of court relationships back to their lords: she is not mentioned in any ambassador correspondence. And yet, these qualities, viewed from a sympathetic perspective, were absorbed into the culture of gallantry. Emphasizing conversation and flair, Larousse’s dictionary describes the Duchess of Etampes (1598—1580), for example, as a woman who Agnes Sorel and Antoinette de Maignelais: A star and a footnote | 95 did not seek the king's love, and she restrained herself from loving him. She wisely limited her ambition to pleasing him, and she pleased him all his life. Through conversation she held on to one whom [sexual] pleasure alone would have would left indifferent. She was the long-term mistress of an artistic and lettered king....8 In a guidebook of 1855 showcasing the buildings, history, monuments, and landscapes in the Paris region, the chapter on Versailles boisterously praises mistress of Louis XIV, Madame de Montespan, attributing to her influence “the splendor of the royalty at Versailles.” Did she not counsel her “royal lover to protect the arts, letters, and sciences, to heed the voices of great men, to build sumptuous palaces, plant marvelous gardens, to put in to practice every second great, noble, and useful ideas?”[299] [300] It goes without saying that it is impossible to generalize about the majority of any complex society at any given time; but we can attest that in the nineteenth century a contingent with access to publication invested itself emotionally in gallantry as a value. Indeed, in the words of Alain Viala, gallantry came to represent a national superiority complex, a way to evoke the ghost of old French distinction and so to compensate for defeat. The tradition of the royal mistress was an important element of this culture. Still, Agnes was always the ideal of the tradition. The primary sources are too sparse and contradictory to allow speculation on whether she was as selfless as she has been made out to be. But if the primary sources yield little on this count, the ways in which they were deployed by later historians to create of Agnes a loving and angelic founding mother of a glorious tradition are worthy of study in their own right. Particularly interesting is how Agnes has been paired with her cousin Antoinette de Maignelais in a binary relationship that flatters the former at the latter's expense. In what follows I explore the Agnes-Antoinette binary, which, visible by the seventeenth century, flowers in the nineteenth, and remains common today, with the goal of comparing the perception of the good versus bad cousin with what the primary sources really say. The studies of Laurent Guitton on Antoinette and Christine Juliane Henzler on the women of Charles VII have recently moved discussion beyond this binary of Madonna versus prostitute, but more remains to be done. Of course we inevitably read primary sources through a modern lens; in the conclusion I will suggest some ways in which we might update how we imagine the cousins by recalibrating how we read the primary sources.