Volume 1 — From The Dublin Review. MADAME DE MAINTENON.

Madame de Maintenon et sa Famille. Lettres et Documents inédits. Par HONORÉ BONHOMME. Paris: Didier. 1863.

Histoire de Madame de Maintenon, et des principaux Evénements du Règne de Louis XIV. Par M. le DUC DE NOAILLES, de l'Académie Française. Tomes 4. Paris: Comon. 1849-1858.

The Life of Madame de Maintenon. Translated from the French. London: Lockyer Davis. 1772.

The Secret Correspondence of Madame de Maintenon with the Princess des Ursins, from the original manuscripts in the possession of the Duke of Choiseul. Translated from the French. 3 vols. London: Whittaker. 1827.

Mémorial de Saint-Cyr. Paris: Fulgence. 1846.

Female characters have, for good or ill, played a larger part on the stage of French history than of English. We have no names which correspond in extensive influence to those of Mesdames de Sévigné, de Maintenon, de Genlis, and Récamier; while the extraordinary power, both political and social, exercised by royal mistresses in France, finds no parallel in England, even in the worst days of courtly profligacy. Nor is it easy to say to what cause this difference between the two countries is to be ascribed. It may be that public opinion has been brought to bear more fully on individual action here than in France, and acts as a more powerful restraint; and it may be also that extreme prominence in society is repugnant to the more modest and retiring habits of Englishwomen. There is no lady in our annals who has occupied a position similar to that of Madame de Maintenon in relation to royalty except Mrs. Fitzherbert; but she, though highly distinguished for her virtues, was altogether wanting in those intellectual endowments which adorned that gifted woman who won the esteem and fixed the affections of Louis XIV. Many circumstances combined to make her the most striking example of female ascendency in France; and the object of this paper will be to trace the causes which led to it, as well as to her being, to this day, an object of never-failing interest to the French people. Like all great women, she has had many virulent detractors and many ardent eulogists; but we shall endeavor to avoid the {800} extremes of both, more especially as M. Bonhomme is of opinion that her biography has still to be written. If there were no higher consideration, self-respect alone would demand scrupulous impartiality in a historical inquiry; and we are the less tempted to depart from this rule in the present instance because we are convinced that in Madame de Maintenon's history there is ample scope for the most chivalrous vindication of her fame, and that, as time goes on, and the materials relative to her contemporaries are collated, her apparent defects will lessen in importance, and her character stand out in fairer proportions and clearer light. It needs only to compare recent memoirs of her with the jejune attempts of the last century, to perceive how much her cause gains from fuller and closer investigation. The Due de Noailles has rendered good service to the literature of his country by his voluminous history of this lady, conducted as it is on the sound and admirable principle of making the subject of the biography speak for herself. There is no historical personage about whom more untruths have been circulated; and, after all that has been said and written, the only way to know her is to read her correspondence.

Lord Macaulay speaks of Franchise de Maintenon in terms so pointed, that they well deserve to be quoted at the outset:

"It would be hard to name any woman who, with so little romance in her temper, has had so much in her life. Her early years had been passed in poverty and obscurity. Her first husband had supported himself by writing burlesques, farces, and poems. When she attracted the notice of her sovereign, she could no longer boast of youth or beauty; but she possessed in an extraordinary degree those more lasting charms, which men of sense, whose passions age has tamed, and whose life is a life of business and care, prize most highly in a female companion. Her character was such as has well been compared to that soft green on which the eye, wearied by warm tints and glaring lights, reposes with pleasure. A just understanding; an inexhaustible yet never redundant flow of rational, gentle, and sprightly conversation; a temper of which the serenity was never for a moment ruffled; a tact which surpassed the tact of her sex as much as the tact of her sex surpasses the tact of ours; such were the qualities which made the widow of a buffoon first the confidential friend, and then the spouse, of the proudest and most powerful of European kings. It was said that Louis had been with difficulty prevented by the arguments and vehement entreaties of Louvois from declaring her Queen of France." [Footnote 159]

The romance of her life began with her birth, which took place on the 27th of November, 1635, [Footnote 160] in the prison of Niort, where her father was confined. His life had been full of adventure and crime, and he was unworthy of the faithful and affectionate wife who shared his imprisonment. He changed his religious profession several times, but at the moment of Frances' birth he called himself Protestant. The child accordingly was baptized in the Calvinist church of Niort, though her mother was a Catholic, and was placed under the charge of her aunt, Madame de Vilette, at Murçay, about a league from the prison. The prisoner, Constant d'Aubigné, was at length released, and being disinherited by his father for his ill conduct, embarked a second time for America about the year 1643, [Footnote 161] taking with him his wife and children. Little Frances suffered so much from the voyage that at one time she was thought to be dead, and a sailor held her in his arms, ready to sink her in a watery grave. "On ne revient pas" as the Bishop of Metz said long after {801} to Madame de Maintenon, "de si loin pour pen de chose." [Footnote 162]

Notwithstanding her father's evil example, there was enough in Frances d'Aubigné's ancestral remembrances to have dazzled her imagination in after life. Her aunt, who had been her earliest instructress, was a zealous Protestant; and her grandfather, Agrippa d'Aubigné, as a soldier, a historian, and a satirical poet, was one of the first men of his day. He had served Henry IV. in various capacities, and was used to address his royal master so freely as to reproach him for his change of religion. One day, when the king was showing a courtier his lip pierced by an assassin's knife, d'Aubigné said, "Sire, you have as yet renounced God only with your lips, and he has pierced them; if you renounce him in heart, he will pierce your heart also."

Frances' father died in Martinique, having lost all he had gained by gambling. Madame d'Aubigné therefore returned to France, and devoted herself to the education of her child. She made her familiar with "Plutarch's Lives," and exercised her in composition. She would gladly have kept the task of instruction to herself, but poverty constrained her at last to resign Frances with many fears into the hands of her aunt, Madame de Vilette. The effect of this transfer was her becoming imbued with Calvinist tenets; and when, through the interference of the government, [Footnote 163] she was removed from Madame de Vilette's care, and made over to a Catholic relative, she proved very refractory, and persisted in turning her back to the altar during mass. Various means of persuasion were tried in vain; and it was not till the Ursuline sisters in Paris took her in hand that her scruples vanished, and she consented to abjure her errors and to believe anything except that her aunt Vilette would be damned. In after-life she used often to say that her mother and several of the nuns had been very injudicious and severe with her, and that, but for the kindness and good sense of one lady in the convent, she should probably never have embraced the Catholic faith.

Only a few years passed before she had to choose between a conventual life and a distasteful marriage. Her mother was dead, and "the beautiful Indian," as she was called, was left almost without resources. She had become acquainted with the comic poet Scarron, and often visited him. He was five-and-twenty years older than herself, and hideously deformed. A singular paralysis, caused by quack medicines, had deprived him of the use of his limbs, his hands and mouth only being left free. His satirical pieces had been very popular, and, though fixed to his chair, he received a great deal of company, and joked incessantly. He was much struck by Frances d'Aubigné, and appreciated her talents the more highly because mental culture was rapidly advancing, and the conversation in drawing-rooms began to be rational. His offer of marriage was accepted by her, for "she preferred," as she said, "marrying him to marrying a convent." In the summer of 1652 she became his bride. Such a union deserved a place in one of his own farces, and gave little promise of happiness or virtue. But the consequences were far different from what might have been expected. A change for the better had taken place in public morals, and Madame Scarron had no sooner a house of her own than she took a prominent part in the movement. She carefully tended her helpless spouse; brushed the flies from his nose when he could not use his fingers, and administered to him the opiate draught without which he could not sleep. She received his guests with a dignity beyond her years, and her conduct was regulated on a plan of general reserve. No one dared address her in words of double signification; and one of the young men of fashion who frequented the house declared that he {802} would sooner think of venturing on any familiarity with the queen than with Madame Scarron. People saw that she was in earnest. During Lent, she would eat a herring at the lower end of the table, and retire before the rest. So young and attractive, in a capital of brilliant dissipation, and with such a husband as Scarron, her example could not but have an effect. Meanwhile she cultivated her mind, and learned Italian, Spanish, and Latin. She knew not what might be required of her, for Scarron's fortune was dwindling away, and he had been compelled to resign the prebend of Mans. He was a lay-ecclesiastic, and, like many literary men of that day, bore the title of abbé. Poverty again stared her in the face, and the servant who waited at table had often to whisper, "Madame, no roast again to-day!" Devoted to her husband's sick chamber, she avoided society abroad, and wrote, only two years after her marriage, letters which might have come from an aged saint on the brink of eternity. "All below is vanity," she said, "and vexation of spirit. Throw yourself into the arms of God; one wearies of all but him, who never wearies of those who love him."

Her enemies have strongly contested her virtue at this period, and appealed to her intimacy with Ninon de Lenclos in proof of their allegations. This modern Leontium certainly frequented Scarron's drawing-room and also (such were the dissolute manners of the age) that of most other celebrities in Paris. But the unhappy woman herself has left behind her an unquestionable testimony to Madame Scarron's purity. "In her youth," she says, "she was virtuous through weakness of mind: I tried to cure her of it, but she feared God too much." She had, of course, many admirers, and she must needs have gone out of the world not to have them. But to be admired and courted is one thing, to yield and sin mortally is another. It might be wished that Madame Scarron's name had never been mixed up with that of Ninon, to whom virtue was "faibleese d'esprit" but the freedom of her conduct must not be tried too severely by the stricter laws of propriety which prevail among us now. She never forgot Ninon, corresponded with her at times, aided her when she was in distress, and was consoled by her dying like a Christian at the age of 90. [Footnote 164 ] She who had boasted that Epicurus was her model gave the closing years of her life to God. [Footnote 165]

Madame Scarron's resistance to the importunities of Villarceaux was well known, and is thus alluded to by Bois-Robert in verses addressed to the marquis himself: [Footnote 166]

But those who follow the course of Madame de Maintenon's interior life know perfectly well how to interpret what Bois-Robert called "haughtiness," and Ninon "weakness of mind." It is a matter of no small importance to rescue such characters from the foul grasp of calumny. Gilles Boileau was the only one of her contemporaries while she was young who dared to throw out any suspicion against her honor, but this he did evidently to avenge himself on Scarron, against whom he had a mortal pique.

A new era was dawning on France. Richelieu and Mazarin had by their policy prepared the triumphs of monarchy; Turenne and Condé had displayed their genius in war; the great ministers and captains waited for the moment when their master should call them to his service; and arts and letters were ready to embellish all with their rich coloring. Louis XIV. really mounted the throne in 1660, and the glory and greatness of France rose {803} with him. Pascal, Molière, La Fontaine, and Boileau published their works almost at the same time. Racine presented to the king the first-fruits of his master mind, and the voice of Bossuet had already been heard from the pulpit. Scarron foresaw the brilliancy of the epoch, but he saw also that his own end was nigh. "I shall have," he said, "no cause for regret in dying, except that I have no fortune to leave my wife, who deserves more than I can tell, and for whom I have every reason in the world to be thankful." Humorous to the last, he made a jest of his sufferings, and, when seized with violent hiccough, said if he could only get over it, he would write a good satire upon it. He died perfectly himself, and was not even for a moment untrue to his character. A few seconds before his end, seeing those around him in tears, he said, "You weep, my children; ah! I shall never make you cry as much as I have made you laugh." He had but one serious interval to give to death—that in which Madame Scarron caused him to fulfil his religious duties. He had always been a Christian, and neither in his writings nor in his conversation had allowed anything prejudicial to religion to escape him. A chaplain came every Sunday to say mass at his house. "I leave you no fortune," he said to his wife when dying, "and virtue will bring none: nevertheless be always virtuous." The point of this admonition must be gathered from the corruption of the times. Her mother's last words also had sunk deep into Frances' memory, for she had warned her "to hope everything from God and to fear everything from man." Scarron died in 1660, and was soon forgotten. His name would now scarcely be known, nor would any at this day be conversant with his comedies and satires but for the exalted position which his widow subsequently attained. His immediate successors obeyed unconsciously the epitaph which he had himself composed, and made no noise over the grave where poor Scarron took his "first night's rest."

Was there ever a more pathetic joke?

When Mazarin died in 1661, the young king summoned his council and said, "Gentlemen, I have hitherto allowed the affairs of state to be conducted by the late cardinal; henceforward I intend to govern myself, and you will aid me with your advice when I ask it." From that day, the face of society in France rapidly changed. Then, as Voltaire says, the revolution in arts, intellect, and morals which had been preparing for half a century took effect, and at the court of Louis XIV. were formed that refinement of manners and those social principles which have since extended through Europe. The example long set by the Hôtel de Rambouillet in Paris was followed by many others, and numerous salons which have since become matter of history united all that was most brilliant in genius and talent with much that was estimable for worth and even piety.

The first ten years of Madame Scarron's widowhood were passed in the midst of these elegant and intellectual circles. The assemblies of Madame de Sévigné, Madame de Coulanges, Louvois' cousin, and Madame de Lafayette, the novelist, were, with the hôtels of Albret and Richelieu, those which she principally frequented. She was in great distress, and her friends tried to obtain for her the pension her husband had once enjoyed. But Cardinal Mazarin was inflexible. He remembered the "Mazarinade," in which Scarron had satirized him, and refused to grant any relief to his charming widow. But she would be beholden to none for a subsistence. She retired into the {804} convent of the Hospitalers, where a relation lent her an apartment, and lived for some time on a pittance she had hoarded. The queen-mother then became interested in her behalf, and a pension of £50 a year was assigned her. "Henceforward," she said in a letter to Madame d'Albret, "I shall be able to labor for my salvation in peace. I have made a promise to God that I will give one fourth of my pension to the poor." She now removed to the Ursuline convent, where she lived simply and modestly, but visited constantly, and received, as the sisters complained, "a furious deal of company." Her dress was elegant, but of cheap materials, and she managed by rare economy to keep a maid, pay her wages, and have a little over at the end of the year. She might have accepted the Maréchal d'Albret's offer of a home in her hôtel, but she preferred entire independence in her own humble asylum. Many a page could we fill with accounts of the friendships she formed at this period. To epitomize her life is in one respect a painful task, for the records we possess respecting her are equally interesting and copious. She has found at last a biographer worthy of her, and it is to the Due de Noailles' volumes we must refer those who long for further details than our space allows us to give. He is the ablest champion of her honor that has yet appeared, and refutes triumphantly the calumnies of the Duc de Saint Simon by which so many have been deceived.

At the Hôtel d'Albret Madame Scarron often met Madame de Montespan, who soon after became the mistress of Louis. The two ladies had many tastes in common, and an intimacy sprang up between them. How strangely they became related to each other afterward we shall presently see. Meanwhile Madame Scarron was overtaken by another reverse. The queen-mother died in 1666, and with her the pension ceased. Many splendid mansions were eager to receive and entertain her, but she declined them all as permanent abodes. A rich and dissolute old man proposed to marry her, and her friends unwisely seconded his overtures; but she was proof against them, and wrote to Ninon to express her gratitude, because the voice of that licentious woman alone was raised in approval of her conduct. She was indignant at the comparison her friends made between the unworthy aspirant and her late husband, and avowed her readiness to endure any hardships rather than sacrifice her liberty, and entangle herself in an engagement which conscience could not approve. Constrained, therefore, by want, she was about to expatriate herself, and follow in the train of the Duchesse de Nemours, who was affianced to the King of Portugal. It was a sore trial, for none are more attached to their country, none endure exile with less fortitude, than the French. She saw Madame de Montespan once more; it was in the royal palace, and that incident changed her destiny. The future rivals met under conditions how different from those which were one day to exist! Madame de Montespan, though not yet the king's mistress, was already in high favor, and the patroness of that poor widow who was afterward, by winning Louis' esteem, to supplant her in his affections, and become, all but in name, Queen of France. Through her mediation the forfeited pension was restored, and we find her name in the list of ladies invited to a court fête in 1688. Nevertheless, her troubles withdrew her very much from the world, and she thought for a time of adopting a religious habit. Indeed, it is not impossible that she might actually have done so, had she not been made averse to the step by the severity of her confessor, the Abbé Gobelin. With a view of mortifying her ambition to please and be admired, he recommended her to dress still more plainly, and be silent in company. She obeyed, and became so disagreeable to herself and others that she sometimes felt inclined to {805} renounce her habits of devotion. [Footnote 168] She retired, however, to a small lodging in the Rue des Tournelles, lived more alone, and, as she wrote to Ninon, "read nothing but the Book of Job and the Maxims."

Here fortune came to her relief. The infidelities of Louis XIV. are unhappily too well known. Suffice it in this place to say that Madame de Montespan bore him a daughter in 1669, and a son, afterward the Duc du Maine, in 1670. Circumstances required that the existence of these children should be concealed, and their mother, in whose heart the voice of conscience was never stifled, bethought her of the good Madame Scarron as one who was well fitted to take charge of their education. Accordingly, she was sounded on the subject. The king's name was not mentioned, but she was informed that the secret regarding the children was to be kept inviolate. She hesitated, refused, reconsidered the matter, and at last consented on condition that the king himself should command her services. The office was far from dishonorable in the eyes of the world. Madame Colbert, the minister's wife, had been intrusted with two of his majesty's children by Madame de la Vallière. It was not on this point that Madame Scarron was anxious, but she feared lest she should give scandal and entangle her conscience by a seeming indulgence to such immorality. Louis at last requested that she would be as a mother to his babes. They were placed with a nurse in an obscure little house outside the walls of Paris. Madame Scarron was to live as before in her own lodgings, but without losing sight of the infants. It was a point of honor with her to observe the utmost secrecy. She visited each of them separately, for they were kept apart, and passed in and out disguised as a poor woman, and carrying linen or meat in a basket. Returning home on foot, she entered by a private door, dressed, and drove to the Hôtel d'Albret or Richelieu to lull suspicion asleep. When the secret was at length known, she caused herself to be bled lest she should blush. [Footnote 169] In two years' time the number of children had increased, and a different arrangement was adopted. A large house was purchased in the country, not far from Vaugirard, and Madame Scarron, now enjoying a certain degree of opulence, established herself there, and gave all her time to the task of education. She was lost to the world, and her friends deeply lamented her disappearance. But she was sowing the seed of her future greatness. The king, who had a great love for his children, often saw her when he visited them; the aversion he had felt for her at first gradually melted away; he admired her tender and maternal care of his offspring, contrasted it with the comparative indifference of their own mother, greatly increased her pension, and, having legitimized the Duc du Maine, the Count de Vexin, and Mademoiselle de Nantes in 1673, soon after appointed them with their gouvernante a place at court. Thus, step by step, without her own seeking, she was led on to exercise a higher and most salutary influence on the king's moral character, till, in reward of her long-tried virtue, she was ultimately to fix his wandering affections and effect his conversion; an object which for so many years she had regarded as the end of her being. She was nearly forty years of age when she entered on her duties in the palace; and, in that difficult and trying position, she set the glorious example of one who was guided in all things by principle, and who thought that the highest talents were best devoted to leading an irreproachable life. She had a work before her, and it was great. She contributed to withdraw the king from his disorderly habits, to restore him to the queen, and to bring about a reformation of morals in a quarter where it {806} had been most wantonly retarded by the royal example. The king, in that day, was all in all. The ideal of the government was royalty. The Fronde had died away, and with it the power of the nobles. That of the people, in the sense in which it is now generally understood, was unknown; even infidels and scoffers scarcely dreamed of it. The monarch, like Cyrus [Footnote 170] and the Caesars, believed himself something more than man. Diseases fled at his touch, and he virtually set himself above all laws, human and divine. It needed the eloquence of a Bossuet to convince Louis that a priest had done his duty in refusing absolution to the mother of his illegitimate children, [Footnote 171] The success of his arms enhanced his self-esteem, and the atmosphere of his court was so tainted with corruption that Madame Scarron often sighed for retirement, and resolved to flee from so perilous and painful a promotion. Her intercourse with Madame de Montespan was chequered with stormy dissensions, and the jealousy of the latter became almost insupportable. The education of the children was a constant subject of contention, and Madame Scarron, who knew that they would be ruined if left to their mother, was not disposed to yield any of her rights. But the Duc du Maine was the idol of his father and mother, and this served to attach them both to the incomparable gouvernante, who loved the boy with an affection truly maternal.

Being disgusted with the court, and having received from the king a present of 200,000 francs, she bought in 1674 the estate of Maintenon, about thirty miles from Versailles, with the intention of retiring thither. But a rupture between the king and his favorite mistress was at hand, and on this circumstance hinged Madame Scarron's future career.

In spite of his profligacy, Louis XIV. was at bottom religiously disposed. His serious attention to business proved him to be a man of thought and reflection, and, when the great festivals came round, it grieved him not to be in a condition to fulfil his religious duties. The sermons of Bourdaloue during the Lent of 1675 touched him, and the expostulations of Bossuet in private deepened their effect. He resolved to dismiss Madame de Montespan, and departed to join the army without seeing her. "I have satisfied you, father," he said to Bourdaloue: "Madame de Montespan is at Clagny." "Yes, sire," replied the preacher; "but God would be better satisfied if Clagny were seventy leagues from Versailles." Meanwhile Madame Scarron, with the Duc du Maine, went to Barèges, and, as the king had, before creating her a marchioness, graciously called her, in presence of his nobles, Madame de Maintenon, we shall henceforward speak of her by the name which she bears in history. The three most important personages in our drama were now separated. The king, at the head of his army, received the letters of Bossuet, conjuring him to persevere in his promises of amendment, while Madame de Montespan, in her retreat, was pressed by the same fervid eloquence to return to the path of virtue. But the Duc du Maine was everywhere entertained as the king's son, and fetes that vied with each other in splendor awaited him and his gouvernante everywhere. So popular was the king, so loyal his people, that his vice passed for virtue or innocent gallantry.

Barèges was not then what it has now become. A few thatched cottages and one house with a slated roof were all it could boast. Madame de Maintenon and her sick charge, the little duke, had but one room, meanly furnished, where he slept by her side. The place was then scarcely known; but the physician Fagon had discovered it during his excursions among the Pyrenees, and, by making Madame de Maintenon acquainted with the {807} efficacy of its baths, he raised it to importance and secured for himself fortune and renown. Here she received many letters from the king in attestation of his friendship; and returning hence, she visited Niort and the prison where she was born, the aunt she had so tenderly loved, and the Ursuline convent where she had first been schooled and supported by charity. Attentions were lavished on her in every quarter, and many valuable records of her family fell into her hands. Among these was the life of her illustrious grandfather, Agrippa d'Aubigné, written by himself.

Her reception by the king was more cordial than ever; but the high favor in which she stood did not break her resolution to renounce a court life as soon as circumstances should permit. She corresponded regularly with the Abbé Gobelin, and often expressed her willingness to follow implicitly his advice. Madame de Montespan regained her ascendancy, at least in appearance; but many thought that the king was fast becoming weaned from her, through the new influence. Madame de Maintenon exerted daily a more manifest empire. Everything, as Madame de Sévigné wrote in 1676, yielded to her. One attendant held the pommade before her on bended knee, another brought her gloves, and a third lulled her to sleep. She saluted no one; but those who knew her believed that she laughed in her heart at these formalities. "I desire more than ever," she said to M. Gobelin, "to be away from this place; and I am more and more confirmed in my opinion that I cannot serve God here." Madame de Montespan, during some years, continued to be the recognized favorite; but the beautiful Fontanges divided with her the unenviable distinction till, having just been made a duchess, she died in the flower of her youth. But amidst all this levity, Louis paid the severe Madame de Maintenon the most delicate attentions, which failed not to excite the utmost indignation in the breast of the royal mistress. At length, in 1680, the dauphin espoused the daughter of the Elector of Bavaria, and Louis, anxious to retain Madame de Maintenon in the service of the court, made her lady of the bed-chamber to the dauphiness. In this honorable office she was set free from the bondage she had endured. She had now nothing in common with Madame de Montespan; and she exchanged the apartments she had occupied for others immediately over those of the king, where he could visit her at will, and, by her lively and flowing conversation, refresh his mind when weary with business, or jaded with pleasures that had long since begun to pall. Surrounded by minions of every sort, it was something new to him to be addressed freely and without any selfish view. This was the secret of Madame de Maintenon's power over his heart, and he confessed the potency of the spell. Madame de Montespan was visited less and less, and Louis passed hours every day in the apartments of the dauphiness, where he found also her lady of the bed-chamber. A cabal was formed by the deserted mistresses and some profligate ministers against the new and truly estimable object of Louis' favor; but their machinations failed. The sovereign at last broke his chains, and Madame de Montespan, like Ninon and La Vallière, made profit of the time which was allowed to her for repentance, but which had been denied to Fontanges. The miserable death-bed of that young creature, distracted by remorse, but still clinging passionately to her unlawful love, deeply affected the king, [Footnote 172] and is said to have powerfully contributed to reclaim him from his evil habits. The benign influence of Madame de Maintenon reunited him to the long abandoned queen, who, with all her exalted piety and Christian virtue, was deficient, it must be confessed, in tact and discernment, as well as in those intellectual {808} gifts which would have made her an acceptable companion to Louis; while her strict devotional practices and retiring habits—habits which her native modesty and timidity of character, combined with her husband's neglect, tended to confirm—may have had no small share in increasing his estrangement. His evenings were now frequently spent with her; and every member of the royal family was delighted with the happy change, and grateful to her by whom it had been brought about. The king himself found the paths of virtue to be those of peace, and the finer parts of his character were displayed to advantage. He had naturally a kind and feeling heart, and was by no means that monster of selfishness and formality which historians so often make him. [Footnote 173]

After the peace of Nimeguen, Louis XIV., having seen his enterprises everywhere crowned with victory, became intoxicated with his own greatness, and arrogant toward foreign powers. But the counsels of Madame de Maintenon tended to restrain his ambition and modify the defiant tone of his government. She well knew that such an attitude, beside being wrong in itself, was the certain forerunner of formidable coalitions. However lightly she might have thought of the Prince of Orange, if singly matched with the greatest potentate of Europe, she wisely judged his talents and prowess capable of inflicting great injury on France if he were in union with exasperated allies. While her hand thus nearly touched the helm of state, it was busy as ever in dispensing private charities; and it was about this time also that she founded an establishment at Rueil which was the origin of "Saint-Cyr." "For the first time," she said, in a letter to her brother, [Footnote 174] "I am happy."

In 1683 the queen died, and Louis, who had become convinced of her merits too late, wept over her when expiring and said, "It is the first trouble she has ever caused me." Madame de Maintenon, who had staid with her to the last, was about to retire, when the Duc de la Rochefoucauld, taking her by the arm, drew her toward the king, saying, "It is no time, madame, to leave him: he needs you in his present condition." Her position at court was now very embarrassing. She was aware of the king's predilections, and he was no less persuaded that she could be attached to him by none but virtuous ties. The dauphiness requested her to accept the place of lady of honor, but she steadily refused. Was it indeed that she aspired higher? Could she fancy for one moment that Louis would exalt her to the rank of his wife? An anecdote related by Madame de Caylus would lead us to suppose that the thought had crossed her mind, and that the king himself had perhaps given her some pledge of his intentions. Madame de Caylus was astonished at her declining a post of such high dignity. "Would you," asked her aunt, "rather be the niece of a lady of honor, or the niece of one who refused to be such?" Madame de Caylus replied that she should look upon her who refused as immeasurably higher than her who accepted: on which Madame de Maintenon kissed her. She had given the right answer. Madame de Montespan was still at court with her children, but her day was gone by; and she whose silent influence had wrought her overthrow never triumphed over her, and even deemed it prudent to abstain from any overt attempt to prevent the king's seeing her.

The decorations at Versailles were at this time conducted on such a scale as to make that spot one of the wonders of the world. All Europe was curious to see its gardens or read of their matchless splendor. Its fountains and cascades were never to be silent, night or day, and the waters of the Eure were to supply them by means of a canal and aqueduct more than fourteen leagues in length. {809} Twenty-two thousand men worked on the line, which traversed the estate and valley of Maintenon. The aqueduct was there supported by magnificent arcades, and its entire cost, without counting purchase of land, was about nine millions of francs. To the town of Maintenon the "very powerful and pious" lady who bore its name was a great benefactress. She obtained for it fairs and markets, and founded in it a hospital and schools. She rebuilt, entirely at her own cost, the church and presbytery, as well as those of two adjoining parishes. She brought thither Normans and Flemings to teach the villagers how to weave, and distributed abundant alms to the poor and infirm. The king staid at her chateau repeatedly, and inspected the works that were rapidly advancing among the hills. Racine also was her guest about this period, and was charmed with his visit. Here, too, in the very house where Charles X., and with him the direct Bourbon line, afterward ceased to reign, was probably fixed that remarkable marriage of which we shall have much to record.

Madame de Maintenon was still beautiful, though in her fiftieth year. She was three years older than the king, and the influence she exerted over him was no matter of surprise to those who were used to watch her radiant eyes and face beaming with animation and intelligence. Severe virtue gave additional dignity to her distinguished and graceful manners, and, while she yielded to none in conversational powers, she was also a good listener. The proud king found in her one to whom he could bow without humiliation, and her conquest of his heart was a signal triumph of moral worth. The marriage was private, and the secrecy so well preserved that its date cannot be ascertained. It is supposed to have taken place in 1685, and was celebrated by the Archbishop of Paris, in the presence of Père la Chaise; Bontemps, a valet-de-chambre, who served the mass; and M. de Montchevreuil, Madame de Maintenon's intimate friend. A union satisfactory to her conscience was all she required, and this being obtained, she took the utmost pains to prevent the matter becoming public. The court remained for some time in ignorance of the marriage; but the fact is beyond all doubt, and is dwelt on with little disguise by the Bishop of Chartres, in letters to the king and his wife, and by Bourdaloue in his private instructions to the latter. While Saint-Simon denounces it as "so profound a humiliation for the proudest of kings that posterity will never credit it," Voltaire, with more good sense, maintains that Louis in this marriage in no degree compromised his dignity, and that the court, never having any certainty on the subject, respected the king's choice without treating Madame de Maintenon as queen. [Footnote 175] There is not the slightest proof that Louis ever contemplated sharing his throne with her openly, and still less that her ambition extended so far. In the passage we quoted from Macaulay the reader will have observed that he introduces the fable with "It was said." He is, in fact, there following Saint-Simon and the Abbé de Choisy, [Footnote 176] whose "Memoirs" are, in this particular, altogether at variance with Madame de Maintenon's character as revealed in her letters, with the modesty and reserve which distinguished her in so high a station, and with the impenetrable silence she always observed with regard to the fact of the king being her husband. [Footnote 177]

Though living in the midst of the court, her elevation was, as Voltaire says, nothing but a retreat. She restricted her society to a small number of female friends, and devoted herself almost exclusively to the king. No distinction marked her in public, except that she occupied in chapel a gilded tribune made for the queen. {810} Louis spoke of her as Madame, and if the Abbé de Choisy may be trusted, Bontemps, the valet, addressed her in private as "your majesty." She was seldom seen in the reception-halls, but the king passed all the time that was not occupied with public affairs in her apartment. He rose at eight, surrounded by his officers; as soon as dressed, he was closeted with his ministers, with whom he remained till midday; at half-past twelve he heard mass, and in passing and repassing through the grand gallery, to which the public was admitted, might be addressed by any one who asked permission of the captain of his guards. After mass, he visited Madame de Montespan daily till the year 1691, [Footnote 178] and staid with her till dinner was announced. This was ordinarily about half-past one. Madame de Maintenon, though she supped in her own room, dined always at the king's table, sitting opposite him. Then followed shooting in the park, which was his favorite amusement. Sometimes he hunted the stag, the wolf, or the wild boar; but from the time he dislocated his arm in 1683, through his horse's stumbling over a rabbit-burrow, he seldom went to the chase mounted, but in a calash, which he drove himself, with some ladies, and very often Madame de Maintenon. Banquets were spread in the woods, and in the summer evenings gondolas with music plied on the canal, and Madame de Maintenon's place was always in that of the king. At six or seven he returned home, and worked or amused himself till ten, the hour for supper; after which he passed an hour with his children, lawful and legitimized, his brother sitting in an arm-chair like himself, the dauphin and the other princes standing, and the princesses on tabourets. During winter at Versailles, a ball, a comedy, or an appartement followed every evening in regular succession. The appartement was an assembly of the entire court, and sometimes ended with dancing, after music, chess, billiards, and all sorts of games.

There was nothing in Madame de Maintenon's temper opposed to the ceaseless festivities of Versailles, Marly, and Fontainebleau. She heightened them, indeed, by the noble pleasures of the mind, which her influence could not fail to introduce. Her style of dress was exquisite, and elderly beyond what her age required; and while she treated all around her with the utmost attention, she was altogether free from airs of importance. She rose between six and seven, went straight to mass, and communicated three or four times a week. While she was dressing, one of her attendants read the New Testament or the "Imitation of Jesus Christ;" and during the rest of the day her movements were regulated by those of the king. Whenever she was at liberty, she passed her mornings at Saint-Cyr, and Louis came to her regularly several hours before supper. She never went to him except when he was ill. Her income amounted to nearly four thousand pounds a year of our money; and of this the larger part was given to the poor. In vain the members of her family looked to her for promotion, in vain they reproached her with forgetting the claims of kindred: "I refer you, madam," she wrote to the Princesse des Ursins, "to the valley of Josaphat to see whether I have been a bad kinswoman. I may be deceived, but I believe I have done as I ought, and that God has not placed me where I am to persecute him continually for whom I wish to procure that repose which he does not enjoy. No, madam, it is only in the vale of Josaphat that the reasons for my conduct toward my relatives will be apparent. Meanwhile, I conjure you not to condemn me." [Footnote 179]

The poor and unfortunate had no cause for similar complaints. She gave away between two and three {811} thousand pounds a year. During the scarcity of 1694, having parted with all she had, she sold a beautiful ring and a pair of horses, to supply the wants of the sufferers. "Distribute my alms," she wrote to her steward, "as quickly as you can. Spare no pains, and repine at no difficulty. Circumstances require unusual charities. See if peas, beans, milk, and barley-meal, if anything, in short, will supply the place of the bread which is so dear. Do in my house as you would in your own family. I leave it in your charge. Incite the people to courage and to labor. If they do not sow, they will reap nothing next year."

She often visited the needy, and relieved their wants with her own hand. She would put off buying anything for herself to the last moment, and then say, "There, I have taken that from the poor." Her charity inspired others with the spirit of self-denial, and the king and his chief almoner often dispensed their bounty through her. But neither poor nor rich diverted her attention from Louis. To his ease, his tastes, his sentiments—even when they shocked her—his time, and his very friendships, she sacrificed everything. He was her vocation; and her own friends could not, as she said, but look upon her as dead to them. To her the king confided all; and thus the cares of state, the perils of war, the intrigues of the court, cabals, petitions, private interests, and even family disputes, were continually rolling their din at her feet. Princes, princesses, ministers, and a crowd of persons anxious to secure their own interests, forced themselves upon her, and broke up all the pleasures of solitude and society, of study, meditation, and correspondence, for which she pined. But she had counted the cost, and bore with equanimity the absence of that perfect happiness which she never expected to attain on earth. The honors which encircled her were brilliant fetters, and galled her no less because they glittered. "I can hold out no longer," she said one day to her brother, Count d'Aubigné; "I would that I were dead!" The sense of duty was her abiding strength, and she derived consolation from reflecting that her elevation was not of her own seeking. The path by which she had been led was strange—so strange that she could not but believe she had a divine mission to accomplish. It was easy to interpret her conduct in a worldly and ambitious sense; but when, since the Master of the house was called Beelzebub, have the children of his household been rightly understood? Whatever is in the heart comes out sooner or later in the writings, and those who read Madame de Maintenon in her letters, will be in no doubt as to what were her guiding principles. Always true to herself, she was an enigma to those only who had not the key to her true character. The year of her marriage was signalized by one of the most important legislative acts in the history of modern Europe. This was the revocation of the edict of Nantes, by which, eighty-seven years before, Henry IV. had, shortly after his abjuration of Protestantism, terminated a long civil war by granting to the Calvinists freedom of religious worship and admission to offices of state. The edict itself was as contrary to the spirit of that age as it would be consonant with the ideas of this. Those who regarded each other respectively as idolaters and heretics had not yet learned to live together in social and political brotherhood. The popes and saintly doctors of those times looked on such fraternity with horror, and foresaw that, if it became general, indifference and widespread infidelity would be its certain results. Events have justified their anticipations; and though it may be doubted whether this or that act of intolerance, such as the revocation of the edict in question by Louis XIV., were wise and expedient under the circumstances, it ought never to be forgotten that the establishment and maintenance of Catholic unity in a {812} kingdom redounds, abstractly considered, to the glory of a Christian prince. To this glory the government of Louis aspired; and while it is clear from Madame de Maintenon's correspondence that she took no active part in the matter, it is evident also that she approved it, as did the nation in general. Voltaire concurs with the Duc de Noailles in exonerating her from the charge of having instigated the revocation and applauded its results. No traces of a spirit of persecution can be discovered in her character. Nothing can exceed the sweetness of disposition with which she reproved her brother, when governor of Cognac, for having treated the Calvinists with needless severity. "Have pity," she wrote, "on persons more unfortunate than culpable. They hold the errors we once held ourselves, and from which violence never withdrew us. Do not disquiet them; such men must be allured by gentleness and love: Jesus Christ has set us the example." [Footnote 180] Ruvigny, a Protestant, afterward made Earl of Galway by William III., spoke of her to the king as one who had a leaning to the Reformed religion; and though nothing could be more untrue, it shows that her zeal as a Catholic could not have been intemperate. The king himself told her that her tenderness toward the Huguenots came, he thought, of her having formerly been one of them; and the historians of the French refugees in Brandeburg, Erman and Reclam, allow that she never advised the violent measures that were used, and declare that she abhorred the persecutions consequent on the revocation. The authors of them, they add, concealed them from her as far as possible, knowing that she desired the adoption of no other means but instruction and kindness. [Footnote 181] In her conversations with the sisters at Saint-Cyr, her language was always in conformity with these statements. The king, she told them, who had a wonderful zeal for religion, pressed her to dismiss some Huguenots from her service, or oblige them to enter the fold of the Church. "I pray you, sire," she replied, "to let me be mistress of my own domestics, and manage them in my own way." Accordingly, she never pressed them to renounce their errors. She showed them the more excellent way when ever she had an opportunity, and in good time had the satisfaction of seeing them all embrace the Catholic faith.

If, then, Madame de Maintenon applauded the revocation of the edict of Nantes, she must not be held responsible for the forced conversions, the dragonades, imprisonments, and emigration in which it issued. Her approval must be interpreted in the same sense as the brief addressed to Louis by Innocent XI., [Footnote 182] in which the pontiff congratulated him on "revoking all the ordinances issued in favor of heretics throughout his kingdom, and providing, by very sage edicts, for the propagation of the orthodox faith." The immunities granted to the Calvinists by Henry IV. involved, according to Ranke, a Protestant historian, "a degree of independence which seems hardly compatible with the idea of a state." [Footnote 183] Religious dissent naturally engendered political disaffection. The Protestant assemblies in the time of Louis XIII. endeavored to establish a kind of federal republic. Six times during that king's reign the Calvinists took up arms. Richelieu maintained that nothing great could be undertaken so long as the Huguenots had a footing in the kingdom. They formed a treaty with Spain, with a view to their independence, and were regarded by the nation at large as a public enemy.

Zealously as Madame de Maintenon labored for the conversion of her own relatives—particularly M. de Vilette and his children—it is no wonder that she concurred with the king, the clergy, and the people in thinking that the {813} time was come to withdraw from the Protestants of France privileges dangerous to religion and to the state, and to concert more effective measures for their conversion. She held with Bossuet that a Christian prince "ought to use his authority for the destruction of false religions in his realm, and that he is at liberty to employ rigorous measures, but that gentleness is to be preferred." [Footnote 184] She believed with Fénelon that the religious toleration which is necessary in one country may be dangerous in another—for the mild and loving prelate of Cambray agreed at bottom with the sterner Bossuet on this subject. [Footnote 185] Whether subsequent events vindicated the political expediency of the revocation; whether the evils it produced were not greater than the good it proposed; whether those who recommended it would not, if furnished with our experience, have wished it had never been carried into effect—are questions of great importance and interest, but foreign to the purpose of this paper.

We have more than once alluded to Saint-Cyr, and it is time now to give some account of the origin and nature of that noble institution, which perished with the monarchy and old aristocracy of France, on which it depended, and of which it was a support. Like most other great works, its beginnings were small. Before Madame de Maintenon was raised so near the throne, she used often to meet at the Chateau de Montchevreuil an Ursuline sister named Madame de Brinon, whose convent had been ruined. Devoted to the work of education, this lady spent her days in giving instruction to some children in the village. Her resources being very low, Madame de Maintenon intrusted her with the care of several children whom she charitably maintained, and often visited them and their mistress, first at Rueil, and afterward at Noisy, where the king placed a chateau at her disposal, and enabled her to enlarge the establishment. The daughters of poor gentlemen were then admitted to the school. The king, returning from the chase one day, paid them an unexpected visit, and was so pleased with all he saw that Madame de Maintenon had little difficulty in inducing him to extend his royal patronage much further, and provide means whereby two hundred and fifty young ladies, of noble birth and poor fortunes, might be instructed, clothed, and fed, from the age of seven or twelve years to twenty. The domain of Saint-Cyr was purchased; and twelve young persons belonging to the establishment, and destined for the most part to a religious life, were selected as mistresses to direct the larger institution. They entered on their duties after a noviciate of nine months, and were called Dames de Saint Louis. Their vows were simple, had reference to the purpose in hand, and were not binding for life. The young ladies were nominated by the king, and were required to prove their poverty and four degrees of nobility on the father's side. The final transfer of the revenues of the abbey of St. Denis to the establishment of Saint-Cyr was not approved by the Holy See till after some years, in consequence of the dispute existing between Louis and the court of Rome. In 1689, however, Alexander VIII. formally authorized the foundation, and in the February of the next year addressed a suitable brief to Madame de Maintenon, expressing the warm interest he felt in her undertaking. Madame de Brinon was elected superior for life, but, as she did not altogether second the designs of the foundress, relaxed the rules, and introduced amusements which were thought too worldly, a change became necessary. It was not without much patience on the part of Madame de Maintenon that the difficulties were at last overcome. Madame de Montchevreuil, their mutual friend, was charged with a lettre de cachet by which the king commanded Madame de Brinon to quit {814} Saint-Cyr. She retired to the abbey of Maubisson, of which the Princess Louisa of Hanover was abbess, and there passed the remainder of her days in honorable retirement, and in the enjoyment of a small pension. She was fond of great personages, and of playing an important part, and this feeling led to her becoming the intermediary between Leibnitz and Bossuet, in a correspondence which aimed at the reunion of Catholics and Protestants, and which, as might have been expected, produced no results.

After Madame de Brinon's departure, Madame de Maintenon devoted herself more and more to her important enterprise. As the young ladies were educated for home and the world, not the cloister, they were indulged occasionally with dramatic representations. This gave rise to two of Racine's finest pieces. Having been requested by Madame de Maintenon to invent some moral or historical poem in dialogue, from which love should be excluded, he produced "Esther," which was first acted at Saint-Cyr in 1689, in presence of the king. His majesty was charmed; the prince wept. Racine had never written anything finer, or more touching. Esther's prayer to Assuerus transported the audience. Madame de Sévigné only lamented that a little girl personated that great king. Numerous representations followed, and crowds of eager spectators, courtiers, ecclesiastics, literati, and religious sat beside the ex-king and queen of England, to hear the pure and harmonious verses of Racine recited by the young, the innocent, and the beautiful, to the richest and softest music Moreau could compose. This success was but the forerunner of a still greater. At the request of Louis, Racine wrote another tragedy the following year—viz., "Athalie;" in the opinion of French critics the most perfect of all tragedies. But the excitement attending the play of "Esther" had been too great to allow of a renewal of the experiment. The "comedy," as it was called, of "Athalie" was performed therefore by "the blue class," without stage or costume, in presence only of the king, Madame de Maintenon, James II., and six or seven other persons, among whom was Fénelon.

In the midst of such amusements, pride and frivolity crept into Saint-Cyr, and Madame de Maintenon became convinced that she had allowed its pupils more freedom than they could enjoy without abuse. Reform was indispensable. The Dames de Saint Louis took monastic vows under the rule of St. Augustin. No effort was spared to inculcate piety and make religion loved. Bossuet and Fénelon were frequently invited to address the young people. One of the sermons thus delivered is found in the works of Bossuet, but the original manuscript is said to be in the handwriting of the Archbishop of Cambray. It bears, in fact, the impress of their twofold genius, but the pathos of its style stamps it as more peculiarly the production of Fénelon. [Footnote 86]

The Duc de Saint-Simon, incapable of mastering ideas of a religious order, carps and jeers at Madame de Maintenon as one who thought herself an "universal abbess." Those who carefully examine the annals of Saint-Cyr, and weigh the difficulties that arose from the various characters of the superiors chosen, the tendency at one time to relax and at another to overstrain the religious education of the pupils, will arrive at the conclusion that few ladies in an exalted position, and in the midst of all that is most worldly, ever possessed so much of that wise and loving spirit of government which should distinguish an abbess, as the wife, friend, companion, and counsellor of Louis XIV. One might almost say that Saint-Cyr was the passion of her life. When at Versailles she went there daily, and often arrived at six in the morning. The young ladies, scarcely yet awake, had the joy of seeing her beloved and {815} revered figure among them in the sleeping apartments; and she frequently helped to dress the little ones and comb their hair, with unaffected and maternal kindness. The unremitting attention she gave to the establishment was soon rewarded, and its beneficial effects on society were placed beyond all doubt. The pupils and mistresses alike of Saint-Cyr were held in great esteem, and many of them, scattered through the kingdom, filled important educational and conventual posts; while in Hungary, Austria, Russia, and the Milanese, institutions were formed on its model. By interesting the king in its details, and inducing him to visit it very often, Madame de Maintenon partly secured the other great aim of her existence, namely, his amusement.

Of all the errors that have, from time to time, insinuated themselves into the minds of Catholics, none has worn a more plausible and poetic aspect than Quietism. It crept into Saint-Cyr under the auspices of Madame de la Maisonfort, a person of a peculiarly imaginative and mystic temperament. She discoursed with like fluency with Racine and Fénelon, and always appeared brimful of intelligence and devotional feelings. Madame de Maintenon had received her as a friend, and hailed with delight her resolution to adopt a religious habit and become one of the Dames de Saint Louis. She made her profession in 1692, and by moderating her vivacity for a time deceived others, and perhaps herself also. Errors akin to those of Molinos were then spreading fast, and Madame Guyon, their chief propagandist, happened to be a relation of Madame de la Maisonfort. When the former lady was arrested for the first time in 1688, her kinswoman and Madame de Maintenon interceded for her. After this she often visited Saint-Cyr, and gradually became intimate with the ladies engaged in the institution. Her manuscripts were eagerly read, and a chosen few who were first initiated in their mysteries inoculated others with the subtle poison, until all the novices, one confessor, the lay-sisters, and many under instruction, abandoning themselves, as they believed, to the sole guidance of the Holy Spirit, practiced all kinds of mystic devotion, talked incessantly the pious jargon of Quietism, looked down upon those who could not embrace the new tenets, and strangely forgot their vows of obedience to superiors. Nothing was heard but the praises of pure love, holy indifference, inactive contemplation, passive prayer, and that entire abandonment of one's self to God which exempts us from caring about anything, and even from being anxious about our own salvation. [Footnote 187] Fénelon, by his intimacy with Madame Guyon, whose director he was, lent life and vigor to these extravagant ideas.

His elevation to the see of Cambray, in 1695, was regarded by them as the triumph of their cause, and Saint-Cyr bade fair to rival Port Royal as a stronghold of suspected tenets. But episcopal authority interfered at last, and through the remonstrances of the Bishop of Chartres, Madame Guyon was dismissed, and her books were forbidden. She continued, however, to correspond with the inmates of Saint-Cyr; and when, in December, 1695, she was imprisoned anew, they exhorted each other to remain firm and endure the coming persecution. Bossuet himself, at the request of Madame de Maintenon, now fully alive to the danger, came to assist in extinguishing the nascent error, while Fénelon, on the contrary, defended his own and Madame Guyon's opinions from what he considered to be exaggerated charges, and wrote his famous "Maximes des Saints" in opposition to Bossuet's "Etats d' Oraison." It is a question whether Bossuet was not led, in the zeal of his antagonism, to make indefensible statements of a different tendency. Fénelon, in fact, charged him with so doing, and the spirit {816} displayed by the Bishop of Meaux in defending himself and prosecuting the condemnation of his former friend, does not present the most pleasing incident in the great Bossuet's career. Perhaps Fénelon has won more glory by his ready and humble submission to the ultimate decision of the Holy See than has Bossuet by his zeal in procuring a just censure on Fénelon's errors. The temper and ability with which Fénelon pleaded his cause began to enlist public opinion in his favor. He utterly disclaimed all participation in the errors of Quietism, and said he could easily have calmed the heated minds of the sisters of Saint-Cyr, and have brought them in all docility under their bishop's yoke. [Footnote 188] But Bossuet invoked the authority of the king, the decision of his brother prelates, and the judgment of the Holy See. The Bishop of Chartres, on making a personal inquiry into the state of things, required that not only Madame Guyon's writings, but those of Fénelon himself, should be delivered into his hands. Whatever the merits of the question in other respects, and whatever opinion may be formed of the respective teaching of these two great men, there can be no doubt that the "Maximes des Saints" had fostered prevailing errors. The king expressed great displeasure at the course events had taken, and by a lettre de cachet in 1698 ordered Madame de la Maisonfort and another lady to quit the establishment, and all other infected persons to be removed. They passed the night in tears in the superior's apartment; and the next day Madame de Maintenon come to console the community for their loss. If she erred at all throughout this perplexing affair, it was by over-indulgence and by forbearing too long. When her duty became clear and imperative, she was never undecided, nor showed any inclination to encourage novelties in religion.

A history of Madame de Maintenon, however detailed, must always be wanting in those personal traits which distinguish most striking biographies, and this for the simple reason that her habits and disposition were retiring, and her daily effort was to throw a veil over herself. That her influence in the long run was enhanced by this modesty, no one can doubt; yet it is not on that account the less true, that in the scenes through which she passed it is difficult to seize and depict her individually. We must, nevertheless, endeavor to give some idea of her relations with the royal family, by some of whom she was beloved, by others hated, and by all held in high consideration. Monsieur, the king's brother, liked and respected her for Louis' sake, to whom he was sincerely attached; but it was far otherwise with Madame. A Bavarian by birth, she was completely German in her tastes, and in the midst of Parisian splendor sighed for her home beyond the Rhine. She was, she said, a hermit in a crowd, and passed her days in utter loneliness. She was a Protestant at heart, intensely masculine, and had little sympathy with Madame de Maintenon's quiet mode of life. So fond was she of the chase, that she continued to follow it, though she had been thrown from her horse six-and-twenty times. Madame de Maintenon was her special aversion, and this antipathy arose principally from her national prejudices against unequal marriages. The king's wife was, in her view, an upstart, and the credit she had obtained at court did not diminish this impression. She spoke with contempt of her piety as mere hypocrisy, and laid to her charge every species of enormity. She had pandered to the dauphin's profligacy; killed the dauphiness by means of her accoucheur; led the young Duchess of Bourgogne into sin; monopolized corn during a famine to enrich herself; and never dreamed of anything but her own pleasures and ambition; she had poisoned Louvois and, nobody knew why, the architect Mansart; she, with Père {817} la Chaise, had instigated the persecution of the Protestants; she had set fire to the chateau of Lunéville; and, from her retreat at Saint-Cyr, fomented conspiracies against the regent! Truly the poison of asps was under the lips of Madame Elizabeth of Bavaria. The dauphiness, on the other hand, neglected by her dissolute husband, made Madame de Maintenon her friend, and found consolation in pouring her troubles into her ear, and listening in return to her sage and tender counsels. After ten years of sickness and sorrow in her married life, she died of consumption in 1690. "See," said the king to her unworthy partner, "what the grandeur of this world comes to! This is what awaits you and me. God grant us the grace to die as holily as she has done!"

The pages of French history present few pictures more replete with grandeur and interest than the retreat of the great Condé at Chantilly. Crowned with the laurels of a hundred victories, the princely veteran there gathered around him a more distinguished staff than had ever sat in his councils of war—men who, endued with intellectual might and moral greatness, were to achieve lasting conquests in the realm of mind. Profoundly skilled himself in history, philosophy, art, science, and even theology, he loved to entertain those who, in various ways, had devoted their lives to the triumph of knowledge and reflection over ignorance and sensuality. All that was noblest in birth and cultivated in mind met together in his orangeries, and sauntered among his gardens and fountains. There the most eminent prelates of their time were seen side by side with the greatest dramatists, historians, and poets. There was Fléchier and Fleury; there La Fontaine, Boileau, and Molière; there Rapin and Huet, La Bruyère and Bossuet. There wit sparkled and wisdom shone as incessantly as the jets and cascades that rose and fell in light and music by night and day. Thither came often the entire court, and with it Madame de Maintenon, a star among stars, brilliant but retiring, to enhance the glory of the illustrious and aged chief. There, honored by the king and closeted with him daily, as at Versailles and elsewhere, she could not fail to receive the willing homage of every member of the house of Condé. There, too, after the general's death, she saw her former pupil, the king's daughter, Mademoiselle de Nantes, espoused to Condé's grandson; and thus, as time went on, she watched the career of those whom she had educated, and who formed the more noble alliances because the king had raised them to the rank of royal princesses. Never did any lady occupy a more remarkable and in some respects a more enviable position than herself. "There never was a case like it," says Madame de Sévigné, "and there never will be such a one again." She united the most opposite conditions. By her union with Louis she was all but queen, and by her admirable tact exerted over state affairs a far greater influence than belongs in general to a sovereign's consort. She had been the servant of that very king of whom she was now the helpmate; a wise instructress to his children, and a mother in her affection and care. At one moment she was acting abbess, controlling the complicated irregularities which had crept into the religious and secular economy of Saint-Cyr, and at another she was mediating as peace-maker in the family quarrels and petty jealousies of pampered courtiers, or by her sage counsels arresting the ravages of war, and rescuing harmless populations from the scourge of fire and sword. Children loved to hear her voice, and hung upon her smiles; the poor and afflicted were fain to touch the hem of her garment, for they felt that virtue went forth from her; none were so great as to look down upon her; none so lowly as to think that she despised them. Her sovereignty over others was that to which men render the most willing obedience—the sovereignty, not merely of station or {818} intellect, but of character of sterling worth, of wisdom learned in the school of suffering, of virtue tried like gold in the fire.

As Madame de Maintenon's talents and merits prevented her being lost in a crowd of courtiers, or in any way identified with them, so, on the other hand, her affectionate disposition kept her from being isolated and closing herself round against any intrusion of private friendship. So far from it, she had with her a select group of ladies who were called her familiars, who shared with her, in a measure, the king's intimacy, accompanied her in her walks and drives at Marly, and were her guests at the dinners and suppers she gave at Versailles and Trianon. They were in some sort her ladies of honor, though, like herself, without any visible distinction. Of these the principal were Madame de Montchevreuil and Madame d'Heudicourt, both old friends, and with them nine others, among whom were her two nieces, Mesdames de Mailly and de Caylus. To each of these a history attaches; for the constant companions of so extraordinary a woman could not but have special attractions and remarkable qualities. There were in this number those who had drunk deeply of the intoxicating cup of worldly pleasure, and having drained its poisonous dregs, thirsted for the fountain of living waters. It was Madame de Maintenon's especial care to encourage such friends in their heavenly aspirations, and lead them, in the midst of the court, to enter the devotional life. Often she called the fervent Fénelon to her assistance, and his letters addressed to Madame de Grammont are a lasting proof of the readiness with which he answered to the call. If, as all her contemporaries assure us, it was impossible to combine more that was pleasing and solid in conversation than did Madame de Maintenon—if, in her case, reason, as Fénelon expressed it, spoke by the lips of the Graces—how admirable must she have appeared when she directed her powers of persuasion to the highest and most blessed of all ends! Neither pen nor pencil can adequately recall the charms which surrounded her; but the captive heart of Louis and the unanimous voice of the richest and most lettered court in Europe attest their reality and power. In her ceaseless efforts to amuse the king, his immortal interests were never lost sight of; and if she spoke to him comparatively seldom on the subject, it was because it occupied all her thoughts. Out of the abundance of the heart the lips are often mute.

In 1686 Louis suffered extreme pain and incurred great danger from a tumor, which at last required an operation. This circumstance brought Madame de Maintenon's capacity for nursing into full play. It was she who watched by his bedside, and alleviated the sufferings of the nation's idol. The surgery of that day was wretched, and the operation for fistula which had to be performed was attended with great danger. Intense solicitude prevailed through the country; for, in spite of all efforts to prevent anxiety, the report spread rapidly that the king's life was in peril. The churches were thronged, and the people's attachment found vent in prayer. The royal patient alone was unmoved. The grande operation, as it was called, had been decided on six weeks previously, and the evening before it was to take place he walked in his gardens as usual, and then slept soundly through the night, as if nothing were to happen. On waking he commended himself to God, and submitted to the painful operation with the utmost coolness. Louvois held his hand, and Madame de Maintenon was in the room. In the afternoon he sent for his ministers, and continued to hold councils daily, though the surgeon's knife cruelly renewed the incisions several times. "It is in God," wrote Madame de Maintenon, "that we must place our trust; for men know not what they say, nor what they do." The fourteen physicians of {819} Charles II. were still more unskilful in his last illness, [Footnote 189] and justify equally the opinion of the Northern Farmer:

In the case of Louis, however, the operator Félix answered to his name. A cure was effected, and the kingdom was filled with demonstrations of joy. "Every one," as Madame de Maintenon wrote, "was in raptures. Father Bourdaloue preached a most beautiful sermon. Toward the close he addressed the king. He spoke to him of his health, his love for his people, and the fears of his court. He caused many tears to be shed; he shed them himself. It was his heart that spoke, and he touched all hearts. You know well what I mean." After dining with the citizens of Paris at the Hôtel de Ville, Louis drove through every quarter amid the loudest acclamations. "The king," wrote his wife again, "has never been in such a good humor as since he has witnessed the enthusiastic love the capital bears toward him. I very much like his sentiments: perhaps they will inspire him with the design of relieving his people." Absolute as the sovereignty of Louis was, his subjects delighted in his rule. He was the last of a long line who, century after century, had formed the nation out of the confusion of feudal times, and had, of all kings, the best right to say, if indeed he ever did say, [Footnote 190] "L'état, c'est moi!"

In him the state was summed up, and the kingdom was impersonated in him. The soldier expiring on the battlefield cried "Vive le roi!" and vessels have gone down at sea with the entire crew shouting the same words; for "Vive le roi!" was, in their minds, equivalent to "Vive la France!" The government of Louis XIV., though despotic, was, on the whole, marked by moderation, particularly after the death of Louvois; and if sometimes, seduced by the glory of foreign conquests and the love of regal display he forgot the interests of his people and the misery his magnificence entailed on them, Madame de Maintenon was always near to counteract the arrogant minister, urge counsels of peace, and heal the bleeding wounds of a loyal population. Yet she was far from being a meddling politician, Her advice was not offered, but asked. She abstained from entering into details, and confined herself to general suggestions of a moral character, dictated by conscience, not ambition. If she guided, or, rather, gently disposed, the king to this or that measure, she was in turn guided herself. Her correspondence with the Abbé Gobelin, Fénelon, and the Bishop of Chartres sufficiently proves that her highest ambition was to be a servant of God. That Racine, of whom she was the friend and patroness, should extol her in his verse [Footnote 191] is not surprising; but the satirist Boileau, be it remembered, was no less her eulogist. If Byron's beautiful lines on Kirke White had the more weight because they occurred in his most biting satire, something of the same kind may be said of Boileau's testimony to Madame de Maintenon:

The Duc de Noailles is not the only member of the French Academy who has arisen of late years to refute the calumnies of Saint-Simon. M. Saint-Marc Girardin has ably defended the {820} victim of his malignity in the Journal des Débats, [Footnote 193] and Messieurs Rigault, de Pontmartin, Monty, Chasles, and Hocquet, have pursued successfully the same generous and equitable course.

When James II., in December, 1688, fled from his kingdom, the sympathies of more than half the French people were enlisted on his side. Ignorant of the British constitution, they knew little of the peril it had incurred through the king's extraordinary extension of the dispensing power, and they saw in the landing and success of the Prince of Orange nothing but a horrible domestic tragedy, in which, through personal ambition and hatred of the true religion, a Catholic sovereign was hurled from his throne by an unnatural daughter and son-in-law. They joined, therefore, without any misgiving, in the cordial reception given to the royal fugitives by Louis, and desired nothing so much as to make common cause with them, and take vengeance on their foes. Madame de Maintenon was not among those who pressed with all ceremony into the presence of the exiled king and queen; but she visited them in private, and was received as became her station. The compassion she felt for their fate, her respectful address and Christian consolations, so won upon Mary Beatrice, that a lasting friendship was formed between the queen in name, not in reality, and the queen in reality, not in name. It continued without interruption during five-and-twenty years, and was cemented by unity of sentiments and mutual services. The ex-queen had married in her fifteenth year, and had overcome, by the advice of her mother and the Pope, her desire to devote herself to a religious life. [Footnote 194] Whatever may have been her trials in a convent, they could hardly have equalled those which befel her as queen. A hundred and forty-five of her letters to Madame de Maintenon are extant, and the readers of Miss Strickland's "Lives" are familiar with the Chaillot correspondence, in which the desolate and sorrowful queen pours forth the fulness of her sensitive heart, and never tires of expressing her love and esteem for that remarkable friend whom Providence has led across her thorny path. Often Madame de Maintenon repaired to Saint-Germain to visit her, and still more frequently the latter came to Versailles to see Madame de Maintenon. It was some relief to escape for a time from that downcast, dreary court in exile, where a crowd of poor but faithful followers gathered around a master equally wrong-headed and unfortunate. The semblance of royalty which was there kept up only increased the sadness of the place, and fostered those jealousies, intrigues, and cabals of which a banished court is so often the parent and victim.

A powerful coalition, in the creation of which the Prince of Orange was the chief agent, had long been menacing France, and was now actually formed. Louis found himself opposed to the greater part of Europe, for the Emperor Leopold, the Germanic and Batavian federations, the kings of Spain and Sweden, and the Pope himself, obliged to act on the defensive, adhered to the league of Augsburg. [Footnote 195]

Three powerful armies were sent by the king of France to the seat of war. The mission of one of them was to capture Philipsburg; and from the camp before that stronghold the king's brother wrote many letters to Madame de Maintenon, describing the operations in progress. The Duc du Maine also, once her pupil, and now in his eighteenth year, wrote to her from time to time, and received thankfully the advice she offered him with all a mother's solicitude. The second of the three armies was charged with the devastation of the Palatinate, and fulfilled the part assigned it with distressing precision. If its soil was not to supply the French, it must {821} furnish nought to the Germans. It was a perfect garden, and Duras received orders to reduce it to a wilderness. Half a million of human beings were warned that in three days their houses would be burned and their fields laid waste. Fiercely the flames went up from city and hamlet, and the fugitives sank with fatigue and hunger in the snow, or, escaping beyond the borders, filled the towns of Europe with squalid beggary. Every orchard was hewn down, every vine and almond tree was destroyed. The castle of the Elector Palatine was a heap of ruins; the stones of Manheim were hurled into the Rhine. The cathedral of Spires and the marble sepulchres of eight Caesars were no more; and the fair city of Trèves was doomed to the same cruel fate. It was time for the voice of mercy to speak. Marshal Duras had already written to Louvois, [Footnote 196] to remonstrate against the barbarous orders he was compelled to execute, and Madame de Maintenon herself is said to have interceded with Louis for the suffering people of the Rhine. The Duc de Noailles, indeed, does not state this, like Macaulay, [Footnote 197] as matter of history, though he allows that it is probably true; and this variety in the views of the two historians, each anxious to do justice in this particular to the king's wife, proves how difficult it is for even the most sagacious and unprejudiced writers to arrive at the exact truth in reference to bygone days. Macaulay is certainly inclined to attribute to Madame de Maintenon a much larger measure of political power than she really exercised; and it is curious to observe the chain of pure assumptions by which, having taken it for granted that she "governed" Louis, he arrives at the conclusion that she induced him to recognize the Pretender as James III. [Footnote 198] In a letter written [Footnote 199] soon after the taking of Philipsburg, she seems to disclaim all active interference in state affairs. In speaking of Louvois, she says that she never contradicted him, and adds, "People think that I govern the kingdom, and they do not know that I am convinced God has bestowed on me so many favors only that I may seek more earnestly the king's salvation. I pray God daily to enlighten and sanctify, him." But it is evident how completely an earnest recommendation to Louis to spare Trèves, and stay the ravages in the Palatinate, may have tallied with that unique and hallowed purpose. Have not those from whom such truculent orders emanate a terrible account to render? Has not she who dissuades a ruler from an iniquitous measure done something toward saving his soul?

There are stories afloat respecting Madame de Maintenon, and in everybody's mouth, which the Duc de Noailles scarcely condescends to notice. That she who always spoke and wrote of Louis in terms of affectionate homage should have seriously committed herself to such assertions, as that her daily task ever since her marriage was to amuse a king who could not be amused, and that he was so selfish that he never loved anything but himself, is an improbability as inconsistent with her character and policy as it is at variance with the facts of the case. That in his latter years her life was embittered by his fretful and querulous temper, and by the fits of passion into which he often fell, and that in one of her letters written at that period she complains of the difficulty of amusing him, is undoubtedly true; but this and similar complaints ought not to be stretched beyond their natural meaning, and made to tell too severely against the king. When, in the early part of 1691, Louis appeared in the camp before Mons, his wife, separated from him for the first time since their marriage, retired to Saint-Cyr, alarmed at the dangers he was about to incur, and unable to conceal her sadness. Consolatory letters poured in upon her from all quarters, especially {822} from her spiritual friends and advisers—the Abbé Gobelin, the Bishop of Chartres, and Fénelon. But, "the selfish monarch who could not be amused," did he, amid the bustle of a siege, find time to write to a lady fifty-five years old, whose only business had been to amuse him or fail in the attempt? He did; and that not once now and then; not briefly and drily, as a matter of form; not like a man who had little to say, and still less attachment, to the person to whom he said it. No; every day in her solitude Madame de Maintenon was consoled by seeing a royal dragoon ride into the court-yard with a letter for her from his majesty, and almost every day with one from the king's brother also. Nor was this all; the king, "who had never loved any one but himself," proved that there was at least one exception to this rule, and that he loved his wife. In 1692 she joined him at Mons, by his command, in company with other ladies of the court, and followed him to the siege of Namur. Amusements were not wanting in the royal camp. The king and his courtiers dined to the music of timbrels, trumpets, and hautboys, and he reviewed his troops in the presence of carriages full of fair faces. But, with all this, he visited the different quarters so diligently, and inspected so closely the works and trenches, riding continually within range of the enemy's guns, that his wife had almost as much anxiety for his safety as when she pondered at a distance the cruel chances of war.

In spite of his many faults, there was much in Louis XIV. to captivate the imagination of one like Madame de Maintenon. "No prince," says the Duke of Berwick, [Footnote 200] "was ever so little known as this monarch. He has been represented as a man not only cruel and false, but difficult of access. I have frequently had the honor of audiences from him, and have been very familiarly admitted to his presence; and I can affirm that his pride is only in appearance. He was born with an air of majesty, which struck every one so much, that nobody could approach him without being seized with awe and respect; but as soon as you spoke to him, he softened his countenance, and put you quite at ease. He was the most polite man in his kingdom; and his answers were accompanied by so many obliging expressions, that, if he granted your request, the obligation was doubled by the manner of conferring it; and if he refused, you could not complain."

Madame de Maintenon's campaigning life was not altogether free from disagreeables. On one occasion, writing from Dinant, [Footnote 201] she relates how they encountered more difficulty in retiring from Namur than in approaching it. They were eleven hours and a half on the road, and wholly unprovided with food. She arrived at her journey's end exhausted with hunger and suffering also from rheumatism and headache; but, it being an abstinence day, the only repast that awaited her was oil-soup. The king likewise, though throughout the campaign he dined ordinarily with all the sumptuousness of Versailles, found himself obliged sometimes to partake of a cold collation under a hedge, without quitting his travelling carriage. Warfare would be an easy calling if such were its worst hardships.

In Flanders, as in France, Madame de Maintenon continued to take the most lively interest in the course of events, martial, political, and social. Proximity to the scene of action did not induce her to exceed those limits of reserve which she had long since marked out for herself. Though informed of all that happened, and forming a sound judgment on almost every occurrence, though earnestly desiring peace rather than aggrandizement, and justice rather than glory, she obtruded no views of her own in the cabinet of the king, nor even influenced the choice of generals. It was her habit of close observation, and her exact description {823} of all that passed, which made Napoleon Bonaparte delight in reading her correspondence, and pronounce it superior to that of Madame de Sévigné, because it had more in it. Madame de Maintenon speaks in one place of her own style as "dry and succinct;" and, indeed, were it not for the piety which constantly breathes through them, her letters would often read like the despatches of a general. She is brief, terse, sententious; her mind being evidently bent on things rather than on words. As a letter-writer, she resembles Napoleon himself more than any other French authoress. Her style is free from that vacillation, that timid adoption of a definite line, which always indicates a weak thinker and a total absence of system in the mind. Had it been otherwise, she would never have stood so high in the esteem of foreign courts, nor would princes and sovereigns, such as the Elector of Cologne, the Duc de Lorraine, and his mother, Queen Eleanor, have written to ask favors at her hands.

The reign of Louis XIV. lasted so long, that neither his son nor grandson ever sat on the throne. If the latter, the Duc de Bourgogne, had not died in his thirtieth year, he might, as the once docile pupil of Fénelon and Madame de Maintenon, have fulfilled his promises of excellence, and have left to his successors a rich inheritance of wisdom. "Telemachus" was not composed expressly for him in vain. He was born in 1682, and at an early age was affianced to Marie-Adélaïde of Savoy. The princess was at that time only eleven years old, and was, by the marriage contract, to remove to France, and be wedded in the ensuing year. The union of the young couple was celebrated in 1697, but on account of their extreme youth they continued to live apart two years longer. During this time, Madame de Maintenon undertook to complete Marie-Adélaïde's education. The instructress was worthy of a princess destined, as it was believed, to govern France. All day she sat by her when sick, and Racine read Plutarch's "Lives" to her during the pauses of the night; Bossuet was her chaplain, and Dangeau, whose manuscript memoirs of Louis' court have proved so useful to historians, [Footnote 202] was her knight of honor. She was the delight of all around, and so charmed the king, that he was never willing to part with her. But there were no apartments Marie-Adélaïde so much loved to frequent as those of Madame de Maintenon. Severe as her admonitions often were, she possessed in the highest degree the art of attaching young persons to her, and inspired them insensibly with taste, wisdom, and nobility of mind. She had long been convinced that the education of princes was conducted, generally, in such a way as to prepare them for habitual ennui. They learned and saw everything in childhood, and, when grown up, had nothing fresh to see or learn. She withdrew her, therefore, as far as possible from the court, and submitted her to the simple and wholesome routine of Saint-Cyr. The princess proved extremely docile, and her amiability was as striking as her diligence. The society of the religious in Saint-Cyr, so far from putting a constraint on her lively and winning ways, seemed only to fit her more completely to be the pet companion of Louis XIV. Her sprightly talk, her opening mind, her elegant simplicity, amused him in his walks and drives, in the gardens, the galleries, and the chase; and while he contrived daily some new diversion for the fascinating child, he could not but trace in her the happy results of Madame de Maintenon's unwearied attention. She entered into all her childish pleasures, and even played hide-and-seek with her, that she might, as she said afterward, gain her ear for serious truths, and by yielding all she could, have the better reason for withholding what would have been hurtful. At last—nor was the time long—Marie-Adélaïde quitted Madame de Maintenon's embrace, and with her heavenly counsels {824} graven on her memory, and given in writing into her hands, bidding farewell to the hallowed cloisters of Saint-Cyr, and to her daily gambols and prattle with the loving and indulgent king, she took her place beside her destined bridegroom, and "entered other realms of love."