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A Popular History of France Vol 6
CHAPTER XLIX. LOUIS XIV. AND HIS COURT.
by Guizot, Francois Pierre Guillaume
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Louis XIV. reigned everywhere, over his people, over his age, often over
Europe; but nowhere did he reign so completely as over his court. Never
were the wishes, the defects, and the vices of a man so completely a law
to other men as at the court of Louis XIV. during the whole period of his
long life. When near to him, in the palace of Versailles, men lived, and
hoped, and trembled; everywhere else in France, even at Paris, men
vegetated. The existence of the great lords was concentrated in the
court, about the person of the king. Scarcely could the most important
duties bring them to absent themselves for any time. They returned
quickly, with alacrity, with ardor; only poverty or a certain rustic
pride kept gentlemen in their provinces. "The court does not make one
happy," says La Bruyere, "it prevents one from being so anywhere else."
At the outset of his reign, and when, on the death of Cardinal Mazarin,
he took the reins of power in hand, Louis XIV. had resolved to establish
about him, in his dominions and at his court, "that humble obedience on
the part of subjects to those who are set over them," which he regarded
as "one of the most fundamental maxims of Christianity." "As the
principal hope for the reforms I contemplated establishing in my kingdom
lay in my own will," says he in his Memoires, "the first step towards
their foundation was to render my will quite absolute by a line of
conduct which should induce submission and respect, rendering justice
scrupulously to any to whom I owed it, but, as for favors, granting them
freely and without constraint to any I pleased and when I pleased,
provided that the sequel of my acts showed that, for all my giving no
reason to anybody, I was none the less guided by reason."
The principle of absolute power, firmly fixed in the young king's mind,
began to pervade his court from the time that he disgraced Fouquet and
ceased to dissemble his affection for Mdlle. de La Valliere. She was
young, charming, and modest. Of all the king's favorites she alone loved
him sincerely. "What a pity he is a king!" she would say. Louis XIV.
made her a duchess; but all she cared about was to see him and please
him. When Madame de Montespan began to supplant her in the king's favor,
the grief of Madame de La Valliere was so great that she thought she
should die of it. Then she turned to God, in penitence and despair.
Twice she sought refuge in a convent at Chaillot. "I should have left
the court sooner," she sent word to the king on leaving, "after having
lost the honor of your good graces, if I could have prevailed upon myself
never to see you again; that weakness was so strong in me that hardly now
am I capable of making a sacrifice of it to God; after having given you
all my youth, the rest of my life is not too much for the care of my
salvation." The king still clung to her. "He sent M. Colbert to beg her
earnestly to come to Versailles, and that he might speak with her.
M. Colbert escorted her thither; the king conversed for an hour with her,
and wept bitterly. Madame de Montespan was there to meet her with open
arms and tears in her eyes." "It is all incomprehensible," adds Madame
de Sevigne; "some say that she will remain at Versailles, and at court,
others that she will return to Chaillot; we shall see." Madame de La
Valliere remained three years at court, "half penitent," she said humbly,
detained there by the king's express wish, in consequence of the tempers
and jealousies of Madame de Montespan, who felt herself judged and
condemned by her rival's repentance. Attempts were made to turn Madame
de La Valliere from her inclination for the Carmelites: "Madame," said
Madame Scarron to her one day, "here are you one blaze of gold: have you
really considered that at the Carmelites' before long, you will have to
wear serge?" She, however, persisted. She was already practising in
secret the austerities of the convent. "God has laid in this heart the
foundation of great things," said Bossuet, who supported her in her
conflict: "the world puts great hinderances in her way and God great
mercies; I have hopes that God will prevail; the uprightness of her heart
will carry everything."
"When I am in trouble at the Carmelites'," said Madame de La Valliere, as
at last she quitted the court, "I will think of what those people have
made me suffer." "The world itself makes us sick of the world," said
Bossuet in the sermon he preached on the day of her taking the dress;
"its attractions have enough of illusion, its favors enough of
inconstancy, its rebuffs enough of bitterness, there is enough of
injustice and perfidy in the dealings of men, enough of unevenness and
capriciousness in their intractable and contradictory humors—there is
enough of it all, without doubt, to disgust us." "She was dead to me the
day she entered the Carmelites," said the king, thirty-five years later,
when the modest and fervent nun expired at last, in 1710, at her convent,
without having ever relaxed the severities of her penance. He had
married the daughter she had given him to the Prince of Conti.
"Everybody has been to pay compliments to this saintly Carmelite," says
Madame de Sevigne, without appearing to perceive the singularity of the
alliance between words and ideas; "I was there too with Mademoiselle.
The Prince of Conti detained her in the parlor. What an angel appeared
to me at last! She had to my eyes all the charms we had seen heretofore.
I did not find her either puffy or sallow; she is less thin, though, and
more happy-looking. She has those same eyes of hers, and the same
expression; austerity; bad living, and little sleep have not made them
hollow or dull; that singular dress takes away nothing of the easy grace
and easy bearing. As for modesty, she is no grander than when she
presented to the world a princess of Conti, but that is enough for a
Carmelite. In real truth, this dress and this retirement are a great
dignity for her." The king never saw her again, but it was at her side
that Madame de Montespan, in her turn forced to quit the court, went to
seek advice and pious consolation. "This soul will be a miracle of
grace," Bossuet had said.
It was no longer the time of "this tiny violet that hides itself in the
grass," as Madame de Sevigne used to remark. Madame de Montespan was
haughty, passionate, "with hair dressed in a thousand ringlets, a
majestic beauty to show off to the ambassadors: "she openly paraded the
favor she was in, accepting and angling for the graces the king was
pleased to do her and hers, having the superintendence of the household
of the queen whom she insulted without disguise, to the extent of
wounding the king himself. "Pray consider that she is your mistress," he
said one day to his favorite. The scandal was great; Bossuet attempted
the task of stopping it. It was the time of the Jubilee: neither the
king nor Madame de Montespan had lost all religious feeling; the wrath of
God and the refusal of the sacraments had terrors for them still. Madame
de Montespan left the court after some stormy scenes; the king set out
for Flanders. "Pluck this sin from your heart, Sir," Bossuet wrote to
him; "and not only this sin, but the cause of it; go even to the root.
In your triumphant march amongst the people whom you constrain to
recognize your might, would you consider yourself secure of a rebel
fortress if your enemy still had influence there? We hear of nothing but
the magnificence of your troops, of what they are capable under your
leadership! And as for me, Sir, I think in my secret heart of a war far
more important, of a far more difficult victory which God holds out
before you. What would it avail you to be dreaded and victorious
without, when you are vanquished and captive within?" "Pray God for me,"
wrote the bishop at the same time to Marshal Bellefonds, "pray Him to
deliver me from the greatest burden man can have to bear, or to quench
all that is man in me, that I may act for Him only. Thank God, I have
never yet thought, during the whole course of this business, of my
belonging to the world; but that is not all; what is wanted is to be a
St. Ambrose, a true man of God, a man of that other life, a man in whom
everything should speak, with whom all his words should be oracles of the
Holy Spirit, all his conduct celestial; pray, pray, I do beseech you."
At the bottom of his soul, and in the innermost sanctuary of his
conscience, Bossuet felt his weakness; he saw the apostolic severance
from the world, the apostolic zeal and fervor required for the holy
crusade he had undertaken. "Your Majesty has given your promise to God
and the world," he wrote to Louis XIV. in, ignorance of the secret
correspondence still kept up between the king and Madame de Montespan.
"I have been to see her," added the prelate. "I find her pretty calm;
she occupies herself a great deal in good works. I spoke to her as well
as to you the words in which God commands us to give Him our whole heart;
they caused her to shed many tears; may it please God to fix these truths
in the bottom of both your hearts, and accomplish His work, in order that
so many tears, so much violence, so many strains that you have put upon
yourselves, may not be fruitless."
The king was on the road back to Versailles; Madame de Montespan was to
return thither also, her duties required her to do so, it was said;
Bossuet heard of it; he did not for a single instant delude himself as to
the emptiness of the king's promises and of his own hopes. He
determined, however, to visit the king at Luzarches. Louis XIV. gave him
no time to speak.
"Do not say a word to me, sir," said he, not without blushing, "do not say
a word; I have given my orders, they will have to be executed." Bossuet
held his tongue. "He had tried every thrust; had acted like a pontiff of
the earliest times, with a freedom worthy of the earliest ages and the
earliest bishops of the Church," says St. Simon. He saw the inutility of
his efforts; henceforth, prudence and courtly behavior put a seal upon
his lips. It was the time of the great king's omnipotence and highest
splendor, the time when nobody withstood his wishes. The great
Mademoiselle had just attempted to show her independence: tired of not
being married, with a curse on the greatness which kept her a-strand, she
had made up her mind to a love-match. "Guess it in four, guess it in
ten, guess it in a hundred," wrote Madame de Sevigne to Madame de
Coulanges: "you are not near it; well, then, you must be told. M. de
Lauzun is to marry on Sunday at the Louvre, with the king's permission,
mademoiselle . . . mademoiselle de . .. mademoiselle, guess the name
. . . he is to marry Mademoiselle, my word! upon my word! my sacred
word! Mademoiselle, the great Mademoiselle, Mademoiselle daughter of the
late Monsieur, Mademoiselle grand-daughter of Henry IV., Mademoiselle
d'Eu, Mademoiselle de Dombes, Mademoiselle de Montpensier, Mademoiselle
d' Orleans, Mademoiselle, cousin-german to the king, Mademoiselle
destined to the throne, Mademoiselle, the only match in France who would
have been worthy of Monsieur!" The astonishment was somewhat premature;
Mademoiselle did not espouse Lauzun just then, the king broke off the
marriage. "I will make you so great," he said to Lauzun, "that you shall
have no cause to regret what I am taking from you; meanwhile, I make you
duke, and peer, and marshal of France." "Sir," broke in Lauzun,
insolently, "you have made so many dukes that it is no longer an honor to
be one, and as for the baton of marshal of France, your Majesty can give
it me when I have earned it by my services." He was before long sent to
Pignerol, where he passed ten years. There he met Fouquet, and that
mysterious personage called the Iron Mask, whose name has not yet been
discovered to a certainty by means of all the most ingenious conjectures.
It was only by settling all her property on the Duke of Maine after
herself that Mademoiselle purchased Lauzun's release. The king had given
his posts to the Prince of Marcillac, son of La Rochefoucauld. He at the
same time overwhelmed Marshal Bellefonds with kindnesses.
"He sent for him into his study," says Madame de Sevigne, "and said to
him, 'Marshal, I want to know why you are anxious to leave me. Is it a
devout feeling? Is it a desire for retirement? Is it the pressure of
your debts? If the last, I shall be glad to set it right, and enter into
the details of your affairs.' The marshal was sensibly touched by this
kindness: 'Sir,' said he, 'it is my debts; I am over head and ears.
I cannot see the consequences borne by some of my friends who have
assisted me, and whom I cannot pay.' 'Well,' said the king, 'they must
have security for what is owing to them. I will give you a hundred
thousand francs on your house at Versailles, and a patent of retainder
(brevet de retenue—whereby the emoluments of a post were not lost to
the holder's estate by his death) for four hundred thousand francs, which
will serve as a policy of assurance if you should die; that being so, you
will stay in my service.' In truth, one must have a very hard heart not
to obey a master who enters with so much kindness into the interests of
one of his domestics; accordingly, the marshal made no objection, and
here he is in his place again, and loaded with benefits."
The king entered benevolently into the affairs of a marshal of France; he
paid his debts, and the marshal was his domestic; all the court had come
to that; the duties which brought servants in proximity to the king's
person were eagerly sought after by the greatest lords. Bontemps, his
chief valet, and Fagon, his physician, as well as his surgeon Marachal,
very excellent men, too, were all-powerful amongst the courtiers. Louis
XIV. had possessed the art of making his slightest favors prized; to hold
the candlestick at bedtime (au petit coucher), to make one in the trips
to Marly, to play in the king's own game, such was the ambition of the
most distinguished; the possessors of grand historic castles, of fine
houses at Paris, crowded together in attics at Versailles, too happy to
obtain a lodging in the palace. The whole mind of the greatest
personages, his favorites at the head, was set upon devising means of
pleasing the king; Madame de Montespan had pictures painted in miniature
of all the towns he had taken in Holland; they were made into a book
which was worth four thousand pistoles, and of which Racine and Boileau
wrote the text; people of tact, like M. de Langlee, paid court to the
master through those whom he loved. "M. de Langlee has given Madame de
Montespan a dress of the most divine material ever imagined; the fairies
did this work in secret, no living soul had any notion of it; and it
seemed good to present it as mysteriously as it had been fashioned.
Madame de Montespan's dressmaker brought her the dress she had ordered of
him; he had made the body a ridiculous fit; there was shrieking and
scolding as you may suppose. The dressmaker said, all in a tremble, 'As
time presses, madame, see if this other dress that I have here might not
suit you for lack of anything else.' 'Ah! what material! Does it come
from heaven? There is none such on earth.' The body is tried on; it is
a picture. The king comes in. The dressmaker says, 'Madame, it is made
for you.' Everybody sees that it is a piece of gallantry; but on whose
part? 'It is Langlee,' says the king; 'it is Langlee.' 'Of course,'
says Madame de Montespan, 'none but he could have devised such a device;
it is Langlee, it is Langlee.' Everybody repeats, 'it is Langlee;' the
echoes are agreed and say, 'it is Langlee;' and as for me, my child, I
tell you, to be in the fashion, 'it is Langlee.'"
All the style of living at court was in accordance with the magnificence
of the king and his courtiers; Colbert was beside himself at the sums the
queen lavished on play. Madame de Montespan lost and won back four
millions, in one night at bassette; Mdlle. de Fontanges gave away twenty
thousand crowns' worth of New Year's gifts; the king had just
accomplished the dauphin's marriage. "He made immense presents on this
occasion; there is certainly no need to despair," said Madame de Sevigne,
"though one does not happen to be his valet; it may happen that, whilst
paying one's court, one will find one's self underneath what he showers
around. One thing is certain, and that is, that away from him all
services go for nothing; it used to be the contrary." All the court were
of the same opinion as Madame de Sevigne.
A new power was beginning to appear on the horizon, with such modesty and
backwardness that none could as yet discern it, least of all could the
king. Madame de Montespan had looked out for some one to take care of
and educate her children. She had thought of Madame Scarron; she
considered her clever; she was so herself, "in that unique style which
was peculiar to the Mortemarts," said the Duke of St. Simon; she was fond
of conversation; Madame Scarron had a reputation of being rather a
blue-stocking; this the king did not like; Madame de Montespan had her
way; Madame Scarron took charge of the children secretly and in an
isolated house. She was attentive, careful, sensible. The king was
struck with her devotion to the children intrusted to her. "She can
love," he said; "it would be a pleasure to be loved by her." The
confidence of Madame de Montespan went on increasing. "The person of
quality (Madame de Montespan) has no partnership with the person who has
a cold (Madame Scarron), for she regards her as the confidential person;
the lady who is at the head of all (the queen) does the same; she is,
therefore, the soul of this court," writes Madame de Sevigne in 1680.
There were, however, frequent storms; Madame de Montespan was jealous and
haughty, and she grew uneasy at the nascent liking she observed in the
king for the correct and shrewd judgment, the equable and firm temper, of
his children's governess. The favor of which she was the object did not
come from Madame de Montespan. The king had made the Parliament
legitimatize the Duke of Maine, Mdlle. de Nantes, and the Count of Vexin;
they were now formally installed at Versailles. Louis XIV. often chatted
with Madame Scarron. She had bought the estate of Maintenon out of the
king's bounty. He made her take the title. The recollection of Scarron
was displeasing to him. "It is supposed that I am indebted for this
present to Madame de Montespan," she wrote to Madame de St. Geran; "I owe
it to my little prince. The king was amusing himself with him one day,
and, being pleased with the manner with which he answered his questions,
told him that he was a very sensible little fellow. 'I can't help
being,' said the child, 'I have by me a lady who is sense itself.'
'Go and tell her,' replied the king, 'that you will give her this evening
a hundred thousand francs for your sugar-plums.' The mother gets me into
trouble with the king, the son makes my peace with him; I am never for
two days together in the same situation, and I do not get accustomed to
this sort of life, I who thought I could make myself used to anything."
She often spoke of leaving the court. "As I tell you everything
honestly," she wrote in 1675 to her confessor, Abbe Gobelin, "I will not
tell you that it is to serve God that I should like to leave the place
where I am; I believe that I might work out my salvation here and
elsewhere, but I see nothing to forbid us from thinking of our repose,
and withdrawing from a position that vexes us every moment. I explained
myself badly if you understood me to mean that I am thinking of being a
nun; I am too old for a change of condition, and, according to the
property I shall have, I shall look out for securing one full of
tranquillity. In the world, all reaction is towards God; in a convent,
all reaction is towards the world; there is one great reason; that of age
comes next." She did not, however, leave the court except to take to the
waters the little Duke of Maine, who had become a cripple after a series
of violent convulsions. "Never was anything more agreeable than the
surprise which Madame de Maintenon gave the king," writes Madame de
Sevigne to her daughter. "He had not expected the Duke of Maine till the
next day, when he saw him come walking into his room, and only holding by
the hand of his governess; he was transported with joy. M. do Louvois on
her arrival went to call upon Madame de Maintenon; she supped at Madame
de Richelieu's, some kissing her hand, others her gown, and she making
fun of them all, if she is not much changed; but they say that she is."
The king's pleasure in conversing with the governess became more marked
every day; Madame de Montespan frequently burst out into bitter
complaints. "She reproaches me with her kindnesses, with her presents,
with those of the king, and has told me that she fed me, and that I am
strangling her; you know what the fact is; it is a strange thing that we
cannot live together and that we cannot separate. I love her, and I
cannot persuade myself that she hates me." They found themselves alone
together in one of the court carriages. "Let us not be duped by such a
thing as this," said Madame de Montespan, rudely; "let us talk as if we
had no entanglements between us to arrange; it being understood, of
course," added she, "that we resume our entanglements when we get back."
"Madame de Maintenon accepted the proposal," says Madame de Caylus, who
tells the story, "and they kept their word to the letter." Madame de
Maintenon had taken a turn for preaching virtue. "The king passed two
hours in my closet," she wrote to Madame de St. Geran; "he is the most
amiable man in his kingdom. I spoke to him of Father Bourdaloue. He
listened to me attentively. Perhaps he is not so far from thinking of
his salvation as the court suppose. He has good sentiments and frequent
reactions towards God." "The star of Quanto (Madame de Montespan) is
paling," writes Madame de Sevigne to her daughter; "there are tears,
natural pets, affected gayeties, poutings—in fact, my dear, all is
coming to an end. People look, observe, imagine, believe that there are
to be seen as it were rays of light upon faces which, a month ago, were
thought to be unworthy of comparison with others. If Quanto had hidden
her face with her cap at Easter in the year she returned to Paris, she
would not be in the agitated state in which she now is. The spirit,
indeed, was willing, but great is human weakness; one likes to make the
most of a remnant of beauty. This is an economy which ruins rather than
enriches." "Madame de Montespan asks advice of me," said Madame de
Maintenon; "I speak to her of God, and she thinks I have some
understanding with the king; I was present yesterday at a very animated
conversation between them. I wondered at the king's patience, and at the
rage of that vain creature. It all ended with these terrible words: 'I
have told you already, madame; I will not be interfered with.'"
Henceforth Madame de Montespan "interfered with" the king. He gave the
new dauphiness Madame de Maintenon as her mistress of the robes. "I am
told," writes Madame de Sevigne, "that the king's conversations do
nothing but increase and improve, that they last from six to ten o'clock,
that the daughter-in-law goes occasionally to pay them a shortish visit,
that they are found each in a big chair, and that, when the visit is
over, the talk is resumed. The lady is no longer accosted without awe
and respect, and the ministers pay her the court which the rest do. No
friend was ever so careful and attentive as the king is to her; she makes
him acquainted with a perfectly new line of country—I mean the
intercourse of friendship and conversation, without chicanery and without
constraint; he appears to be charmed with it."
Discreet and adroit as she was, and artificial without being false,
Madame de Maintenon gloried in bringing back the king and the court to
the ways of goodness. "There is nothing so able as irreproachable
conduct," she used to say. The king often went to see the queen; the
latter heaped attentions upon Madame de Maintenon. "The king never
treated me more affectionately than he has since she had his ear," the
poor princess would say. The dauphiness had just had a son. The joy at
court was excessive. "The king let anybody who pleased embrace him,"
says the Abbe de Croisy; "he gave everybody his hand to kiss. Spinola,
in the warmth of his zeal, bit his finger; the king began to exclaim.
'Sir,' interrupted the other, 'I ask your Majesty's pardon; but, if I
hadn't bitten you, you would not have noticed me.' The lower orders
seemed beside themselves, they made bonfires of everything. The porters
and the Swiss burned the poles of the chairs, and even the floorings and
wainscots intended for the great gallery. Bontemps, in wrath, ran and
told the king, who burst out laughing and said, 'Let them be; we will
have other floorings.'"
The least clear-sighted were beginning to discern the modest beams of a
rising sun. Madame de Montespan, who had a taste for intellectual
things, had not long since recommended Racine and Boileau to the king to
write a history of his reign. They had been appointed historiographers.
"When they had done some interesting piece," says Louis Racine in his
Memoires, "they used to go and read it to the king at Madame de
Montespan's. Madame de Maintenon was generally present at the reading.
She, according to Boileau's account, liked my father better than him, and
Madame de Montespan, on the contrary, liked Boileau better than my
father, but they always paid their court jointly, without any jealousy
between them. When Madame de Montespan would let fall some rather tart
expressions, my father and Boileau, though by no means sharp-sighted,
observed that the king, without answering her, looked with a smile at
Madame de Maintenon, who was seated opposite to him on a stool, and who
finally disappeared all at once from these meetings. They met her in the
gallery, and asked her why she did not come any more to hear their
readings. She answered very coldly, 'I am no longer admitted to those
mysteries.' As they found a great deal of cleverness in her, they were
mortified and astonished at this. Their astonishment was very much
greater, then, when the king, being obliged to keep his bed, sent for
them with orders to bring what they had newly written of history, and
they saw as they went in Madame de Maintenon sitting in an arm-chair near
the king's pillow, chatting familiarly with his Majesty. They were just
going to begin their reading, when Madame do Montespan, who had not been
expected, came in, and after a few compliments to the king, paid such
long ones to Madame de Maintenon, that the king, to stop them, told her
to sit down. 'As it would not be fair,' he added, 'to read without you a
work which you yourself ordered.' From this day, the two historians paid
their court to Madame de Maintenon as far as they knew how to do so."
The queen had died on the 30th of July, 1683, piously and gently, as she
had lived. "This is the first sorrow she ever caused me," said the king,
thus rendering homage in his superb and unconscious egotism, to the
patient virtue of the wife he had put to such cruel trials. Madame de
Maintenon was agitated but resolute. "Madame de Montespan has plunged
into the deepest devoutness," she wrote, two months after the queen's
death; "it is quite time she edified us; as for me, I no longer think of
retiring." Her strong common sense and her far-sighted ambition, far
more than her virtue, had secured her against rocks ahead; henceforth she
saw the goal, she was close upon it, she moved towards it with an even
step. The king still looked in upon Madame de Montespan of an evening
on his way to the gaming-table; he only staid an instant, to pass on to
Madame de Maintenon's; the latter had modestly refused to become lady in
attendance upon the dauphiness. She, however, accompanied the king on
all his expeditions, "sending him away always afflicted, but, never
disheartened." Madame de Montespan, piqued to see that the king no
longer thought of anybody but Madame de Maintenon, "said to him one day
at Marly," writes Dangeau, "that she has a favor to ask of him, which was
to let her have the duty of entertaining the second-carriage people and
of amusing the antechamber." It required more than seven years of wrath
and humiliation to make her resolve upon quitting the court, in 1691.
The date has never been ascertained exactly of the king's private
marriage with Madame de Maintenon. It took place, probably, eighteen
months or two years after the queen's death; the king was forty-seven,
Madame de Maintenon fifty.
"She had great remains of beauty, bright and sprightly eyes, an
imcomparable grace," says St. Simon, who detested her; "an air of ease,
and yet of restraint and respect; a great deal of cleverness, with a
speech that was sweet, correct, in good terms, and naturally eloquent and
brief."
Madame do La Valliere had held sway over the young and passionate heart
of the prince, Madame de Montespan over the court, Madame de Maintenon
alone established her empire over the man and the king. "Whilst giving
up our heart, we must remain absolute master of our mind," Louis XIV.
had written, "separate our affections from our resolves as a sovereign,
that she who enchants us may never have liberty to speak to us of our
business or of the people who serve us, and that they be two things
absolutely distinct." The king had scrupulously applied this maxim;
Mdlle. de La Valliere had never given a thought to business; Madame de
Montespan had sought only to shine, disputing the influence of Colbert
when he would have put a limit upon her ruinous fancies, leaning for
support at the last upon Louvois, in order to counterbalance the growing
power of Madame de Maintenon; the latter alone had any part in affairs,
a smaller part than has frequently been made out, but important,
nevertheless, and sometimes decisive. Ministers went occasionally to do
their work in her presence with the king, who would turn to her when the
questions were embarrassing, and ask, "What does your Solidity think?"
The opinions she gave were generally moderate and discreet. "I did not
manage to please in my conversation about the buildings," she wrote to
Cardinal Noailles, "and what grieves me is to have caused vexation to no
purpose. Another block of chambers is being built here at a cost of a
hundred thousand francs; Marly will soon be a second Versailles. The
people, what will become of them?" And later on: "Would you think
proper, monsignor, to make out a list of good bishops? You could send it
me, so that, on the occasions which are constantly occurring, I might
support their interests, and they might have the business referred to
them in which they ought to have a hand, and for which they are the
proper persons. I am always spoken to when the question is of them; and
if I were better informed, I should be bolder." "It is said that you
meddle too little with business," Fenelon wrote to her in 1694; "your
mind is better calculated for it than you suppose. You ought to direct
your whole endeavors to giving the king views tending to peace, and
especially to the relief of the people, to moderation, to equity, to
mistrust of harsh and violent measures, to horror for acts of arbitrary
authority, and finally to love of the Church, and to assiduity in seeking
good pastors for it." Neither Fenelon nor Madame de Maintenon had seen
in the revocation of the edict of Nantes "an act of arbitrary authority,
or a harsh and violent measure." She was not inclined towards
persecution, but she feared lest her moderation should be imputed to a
remnant of prejudice in favor of her former religion, "and this it is,"
she would say, "which makes me approve of things quite opposed to my
sentiments." An egotistical and cowardly prudence, which caused people
to attribute to Madame de Maintenon, in the severities against the
Huguenots, a share which she had not voluntarily or entirely assumed.
Whatever the apparent reserve and modesty with which it was cloaked, the
real power of Madame de Maintenon over the king's mind peeped out more
and more into broad daylight. She promoted it dexterously by her extreme
anxiety to please him, as well as by her natural and sincere attachment
to the children whom she had brought up, and who had a place near the
heart of Louis XIV. Already the young Duke of Maine had been sent to the
army at the dauphin's side; the king was about to have him married
[August 29, 1692] to Mdlle. de Charolais; carefully seeking for his
natural children alliances amongst the princes of his blood, he had
recently given Mdlle. de Nantes, daughter of Madame de Montespan, to the
duke, grandson of the great Conde. "For a long time past," says St.
Simon, "Madame de Maintenon, even more than the king, had been thinking
of marrying Mdlle. de Blois, Madame de Montespan's second daughter, to
the Duke of Chartres; he was the king's own and only nephew, and the
first moves towards this marriage were the more difficult in that
Monsieur was immensely attached to all that appertained to his greatness,
and Madame was of a nation which abhorred misalliances, and of a
character which gave no promise of ever making this marriage agreeable to
her." The king considered himself sure of his brother; he had set his
favorites to work, and employed underhand intrigues. "He sent for the
young Duke of Chartres, paid him attention, told him he wanted to have
him settled in life, that the war which was kindled on all sides put out
of his reach the princesses who might have suited him, that there were no
princesses of the blood of his own age, that he could not better testify
his affection towards him than by offering him his daughter whose two
sisters had married princes of the blood; but that, however eager he
might be for this marriage, he did not want to put any constraint upon
him, and would leave him full liberty in the matter. This language,
addressed with the awful majesty so natural to the king to a prince who
was timid, and had not a word to say for himself, put him at his wits'
end." He fell back upon the wishes of his father and mother. "That is
very proper in you," replied the king; "but, as you consent, your father
and mother will make no objection;" and, turning to Monsieur, who was
present, "Is it not so, brother?" he asked. Monsieur had promised; a
messenger was sent for Madame, who cast two furious glances at her
husband and her son, saying that, as they were quite willing, she had
nothing to say, made a curt obeisance, and went her way home. Thither
the court thronged next day; the marriage was announced. "Madame was
walking in the gallery with her favorite, Mdlle. de Chateau-Thiers,
taking long steps, handkerchief in hand, weeping unrestrainedly, speaking
somewhat loud, gesticulating and making a good picture of Ceres after
the rape of her daughter Proserpine, seeking her in a frenzy, and
demanding her back from Jupiter. Everybody saluted, and stood aside out
of respect. Monsieur had taken refuge in lansquenet; never was anything
so shamefaced as his look or so disconcerted as his whole appearance, and
this first condition lasted more than a month with him. The Duke of
Chartres came into the gallery, going up to his mother, as he did every
day, to kiss her hand. At that moment, Madame gave him a box of the ear
so loud that it was heard some paces off, and given as it was before the
whole court, covered the poor prince with confusion, and overwhelmed the
countless spectators with prodigious astonishment." That did not prevent
or hamper the marriage, which took place with great pomp at Versailles on
the 18th of February, 1692. The king was, and continued to the last, the
absolute and dread master of all his family, to its remotest branches.
He lost through this obedience a great deal that is charming and sweet
in daily intercourse. For him and for Madame de Maintenon the great and
inexhaustible attraction of the Duchess of Burgundy was her gayety and
unconstrained ease, tempered by the most delicate respect, which this
young princess, on coming as quite a child to France from the court of
Savoy, had tact enough to introduce, and always maintain, amidst the most
intimate familiarity. "In public, demure, respectful with the king, and
on terms of timid propriety with Madame de Maintenon, whom she never
called anything but aunt, thus prettily blending rank and affection.
In private, chattering, frisking, fluttering around them, at one time
perched on the arm of one or the other's chair, at another playfully
sitting on their knee, she would throw herself upon their necks, embrace
them, kiss them, fondle them, pull them to pieces, chuck them under the
chin, tease them, rummage their tables, their papers, their letters,
reading them sometimes against their will, according as she saw that they
were in the humor to laugh at it, and occasionally speaking thereon.
Admitted to everything, even at the reception of couriers bringing the
most important news, going into the king at any hour, even at the time
the council was sitting, useful and also fatal to ministers themselves,
but always inclined to help, to excuse, to benefit, unless she were
violently set against anybody. The king could not do without her; when,
rarely, she was absent from his supper in public, it was plainly shown by
a cloud of more than usual gravity and taciturnity over the king's whole
person; and so, when it happened that some ball in winter or some party
in summer made her break into the night, she arranged matters so well
that she was there to kiss the king the moment he was awake, and to amuse
him with an account of the affair." [Memoires de St. Simon, t. x.
p. 186.]
The dauphiness had died in 1690; the Duchess of Burgundy was, therefore,
almost from childhood queen of the court, and before long the idol of the
courtiers; it was around her that pleasures sprang up; it was for her
that the king gave the entertainments to which he had habituated
Versailles, not that for her sake or to take care of her health he would
ever consent to modify his habits or make the least change in his plans.
"Thank God, it is over!" he exclaimed one day, after an accident to the
princess; "I shall no longer be thwarted in my trips, and in all I desire
to do, by the representations of physicians. I shall come and go as I
fancy; and I shall be left in peace." Even in his court, and amongst his
most devoted servants, this monstrous egotism astounded and scandalized
everybody. "A silence in which you might have heard an ant move
succeeded this sally," says St. Simon, who relates the scene; "we looked
down; we hardly dared draw breath. Everybody stood aghast. To the very
builders-men and gardeners everybody was motionless. This silence lasted
more than a quarter of an hour. The king broke it, as he leaned against
a balustrade of the great basin, to speak about a carp. Nobody made any
answer. He afterwards addressed his remarks about these carp to some
builder's-men who did not keep up the conversation in the regular way; it
was but a question of carp with them. Everything was at a low ebb, and
the king went away some little time after. As soon as we dared look at
one another out of his sight, our eyes meeting told all." There was no
venturing beyond looks. Fenelon had said, with severe charity, "God will
have compassion upon a prince beset from his youth up by flatterers."
Flattery ran a risk of becoming hypocrisy. On returning to a regular
life, the king was for imposing the same upon his whole court; the
instinct of order and regularity, smothered for a while in the heyday of
passion, had resumed all its sway over the naturally proper and steady
mind of Louis XIV. His dignity and his authority were equally involved
in the cause of propriety and regularity at his court; he imposed this
yoke as well as all the others; there appeared to be entire obedience;
only some princes or princesses escaped it sometimes, getting about them
a few free-thinkers or boon-companions; good, honest folks showed
ingenuous joy; the virtuous and far-sighted were secretly uneasy at the
falsehood, and deplored the pressure put on so many consciences and so
many lives. The king was sincere in his repentance for the past, many
persons in his court were as sincere as he; others, who were not,
affected, in order to please him, the externals of austerity; absolute
power oppressed all spirits, extorting from them that hypocritical
complaisance which is liable to engender; corruption was already brooding
beneath appearances of piety; the reign of Louis XV. was to see its
deplorable fruits displayed with a haste and a scandal which are to be
explained only by the oppression exercised in the last years of King
Louis XIV.
Madame de Maintenon was like the genius of this reaction towards
regularity, propriety, order; all the responsibility for it had been
thrown upon her; the good she did has disappeared beneath the evil she
allowed or encouraged; the regard lavished upon her by the king has
caused illusions as to the discreet care she was continually taking to
please him. She was faithful to her friends, so long as they were in
favor with the king; if they had the misfortune to displease him, she,
at the very least, gave up seeing them; without courage or hardihood to
withstand the caprices and wishes of Louis XIV., she had gained and
preserved her empire by dint of dexterity and far-sighted suppleness
beneath the externals of dignity.
She never forgot her origin. "I am not a grandee," she would say;
"I am a mushroom." Her life, entirely devoted to the king, had become a
veritable slavery; she said as much to Mdlle. d'Aumale at St. Cyr. "I
have to take for my prayers and for mass the time when everybody else is
still sleeping. For, when once they begin coming into my room, at half
past seven, I haven't another moment to myself. They come filing in, and
nobody goes out without being relieved by somebody higher. At last comes
the king; then, of course, they all have to go out; he remains with me up
to mass. I am, still in my night-cap. The king comes back after mass;
then the Duchess of Burgundy with her ladies. They remain whilst I dine.
I have to keep up the conversation, which flags every moment, and to
manage so as to harmonize minds and reconcile hearts which are as far as
possible asunder. The circle is all round me, and I cannot ask for
anything to drink; I sometimes say to them (aside), 'It is a great honor,
but really I should prefer a footman.' At last they all go away to
dinner. I should be free during that time, if Monseigneur did not
generally choose it for coming to see me, for he often dines earlier in
order to go hunting. He is very difficult to entertain, having very
little to say, and finding himself a bore, and running away from himself
continually; so I have to talk for two. Immediately after the king has
dined, he comes into my room with all the royal family, princes and
princesses; then I must be prepared for the gayest of conversation, and
wear a smiling face amidst so much distressing news. When this company
disperses, some lady has always something particular to say to me; the
Duchess of Burgundy also wants to have a chat. The king returns from
hunting. He comes to me. The door is shut, and nobody else is admitted.
Then I have to share his secret troubles, which are no small number.
Arrives a minister; and the king sets himself to work. If I am not
wanted at this consultation, which seldom happens, I withdraw to some
farther distance and write or pray. I sup, whilst the king is still at
work. I am restless, whether he is alone or not. The king says to me,
'You are tired, Madame; go to bed.' My women come. But I feel that they
interfere with the king, who would chat with me, and does not like to
chat before them; or, perhaps, there are some ministers still there, whom
he is afraid they may overhear. Wherefore I make haste to undress, so
much so that I often feel quite ill from it. At last I am in bed. The
king comes up and remains by my pillow until he goes to supper. But a
quarter of an hour before supper, the dauphin and the Duke and Duchess of
Burgundy come in to me again. At ten, everybody goes out. At last I am
alone, but very often the fatigues of the day prevent me from sleeping."
She was at that time seventy. She was often ailing; but the Duchess of
Burgundy was still very young, and the burden of the most private matters
of court diplomacy fell entirely upon Madame de Maintenon. "The Princess
des Ursins is about to return to Spain," she said; "if I do not take her
in hand, if I do not repair by my attentions the coldness of the Duchess
of Burgundy, the indifference of the king and the curtness of the other
princes, she will go away displeased with our court, and it is expedient
that she should praise it, and speak well of it in Spain."
It was, in fact, through Madame de Maintenon and her correspondence with
the Princess des Ursins, that the private business between the two courts
of France and Spain was often carried on. At Madrid, far more than at
Versailles, the influence of women was all-powerful. The queen ruled her
husband, who was honest and courageous, but without wit or daring; and
the Princess des Ursins ruled the queen, as intelligent and as amiable as
her sister the Duchess of Burgundy, but more ambitious and more haughty.
Louis XIV. had several times conceived some misgiving of the camarera
major's influence over his grandson; she had been disgraced, and then
recalled; she had finally established her sway by her fidelity, ability,
dexterity, and indomitable courage. She served France habitually, Spain
and her own influence in Spain always; she had been charming, with an air
of nobility, grace, elegance, and majesty all together, and accustomed to
the highest society and the most delicate intrigues, during her sojourn
at Rome and Madrid; she was full of foresight and calculation, but
impassioned, ambitious, implacable, pushing to extremes her amity as well
as her hatred, faithful to her master and mistress in their most cruel
trials, and then hampering and retarding peace for the sake of securing
for herself a principality in the Low Countries. Without having risen
from the ranks, like Madame de Maintenon, she had reached a less high and
less safe elevation; she had been more absolutely and more daringly
supreme during the time of her power, and at last she fell with the
rudest shock, without any support from Madame de Maintenon. The
pretensions of Madame des Ursins during the negotiations had offended
France; "this was the stone of stumbling between the two supreme
directresses," says St. Simon; after this attempt at sovereignty, there
was no longer the same accord between Madame de Maintenon and Madame des
Ursins, but this latter had reached in Spain a point at which she more
easily supposed that she could dispense with it. The Queen of Spain had
died at the age of twenty-six, in 1714; did the princess for a moment
conceive the hope of marrying Philip V. in spite of the disproportion in
rank and age? Nobody knows; she had already been reigning as sovereign
mistress for some months, when she received from the king this stunning
command: "Look me out a wife." She obeyed; she looked out. Alberoni, an
Italian priest, brought into Spain by the Duke of Vendome, drew her
attention to the Princess of Parma, Elizabeth Farnese. The principality
was small, the princess young; Alberoni laid stress upon her sweetness
and modesty. "Nothing will be more easy," he said, "than for you to
fashion her to Spanish gravity, by keeping her retired; in the capacity
of her camarera major, intrusted with her education, you will easily be
able to acquire complete sway over her mind." The Princess des Ursins
believed him, and settled the marriage. "Cardonne has surrendered at
last, Madame," she wrote on the 20th of September, 1714, to Madame de
Maintenon; "there is nothing left in Catalonia that is not reduced. The
new queen, at her coming into this kingdom, is very fortunate to find no
more war there. She whom we have lost would have been beside herself
with delight at enjoying peace after having experienced such cruel
sufferings of all kinds. The longer I live, the more I see that we are
never so near a reverse of Fortune as when she is favorable, or so near
receiving favors as when she is maltreating us. For that reason, Madame,
if one were wise, one would take her inconstancy graciously."
The time had come for Madame des Ursins to make definitive trial of
Fortune's inconstancy. She had gone to meet the new queen, in full dress
and with her ornaments; Elizabeth received her coldly; they were left
alone; the queen reproached the princess with negligence in her costume
Madame des Ursins, strangely surprised, would have apologized, "but, all
at once there was the queen at offensive words, and screaming, summoning,
demanding officers, guards, and imperiously ordering Madame des Ursins
out of her presence. She would have spoken; but the queen, with
redoubled rage and threats, began to scream out for the removal of this
mad woman from her presence and her apartments; she had her put out by
the shoulders, and on the instant into a carriage with one of her women,
to be taken at once to St. Jean-de-Luz. It was seven o'clock at night,
the day but one before Christmas, the ground all covered with ice and
snow; Madame des Ursins had no time to change gown or head-dress, to take
any measures against the cold, to get any money, or any anything else at
all." Thus she was conducted almost without a mouthful of food to the
frontier of France. She hoped for aid from the king of Spain; but none
came; it got known that the queen had been abetted in everything and
beforehand by Philip V. On arriving at St. Jean-de-Luz, she wrote to the
king and to Madame de Maintenon: "Can you possibly conceive, Madame, the
situation in which I find myself? Treated in the face of all Europe,
with more contempt by the Queen of Spain than if I were the lowest of
wretches? They want to persuade me that the king acted in concert with a
princess who had me treated with such cruelty. I shall await his orders
at St. Jean-de-Luz, where I am in a small house close by the sea. I see
it often stormy and sometimes calm; a picture of courts. I shall have no
difficulty in agreeing with you that it is of no use looking for
stability but in God. Certainly it cannot be found in the human heart,
for who was ever more sure than I was of the heart of the King of Spain?"
The king did not reply at all, and Madame de Maintenon but coldly,
begging the princess, however, to go to Versailles. There she passed but
a short time, and received notice to leave the kingdom. With great
difficulty she obtained an asylum at Rome, where she lived seven years
longer, preserving all her health, strength, mind, and easy grace until
she died, in 1722, at more than eighty-four years of age, in obscurity
and sadness, notwithstanding her opulence, but avenged of her Spanish
foes, Cardinals della Giudice and Alberoni, whom she met again at Rome,
disgraced and fugitive like herself. "I do not know where I may die,"
she wrote to Madame de Maintenon, at that time in retirement at St. Cyr.
Both had survived their power; the Princess des Ursins had not long since
wanted to secure for herself a dominion; Madame de Maintenon, more
far-sighted and more modest, had aspired to no more than repose in the
convent which she had founded and endowed. Discreet in her retirement as
well as in her life, she had not left to chance the selection of a place
where she might die.
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