TRANSLATOR’S NOTE.
Sainte-Beuve, in his essay on Madame, suggested to the French editor of her letters that he should make a more complete collection of them. M. Brunet professes to have done so in the edition from which this translation is selected.[2] But when examined the additions prove very insignificant, and the arrangement, though apparently more chronological, interferes with the interest of the reader. Passages which seem to belong together are cut up into sentences and scattered singly over weeks and months; so that the point of Madame’s racy representations is often weakened. In this translation parts of the letters of each year on a given topic are put together, so as to offer a better picture of Madame’s thought; as for her nature, she gives that herself, and no one can better the portrait.
Nothing need be added to Sainte-Beuve’s admirable essay beyond a brief account of Madame’s parentage, family relations, and the history, such as it is, of her correspondence.
She was born at Heidelberg in 1652. Soon after her birth, her father, Charles-Louis, Elector Palatine, parted from his wife, Charlotte of Hesse-Cassel, and the little daughter, Élisabeth-Charlotte, was given to the care of her father’s sister, Sophia, Electress of Hanover (mother of George I. of England); with whom she remained until her marriage, against her wishes, in 1671, to Monsieur, brother of Louis XIV., after the death of his first wife, Henrietta, daughter of Charles I. of England. The marriage was political,—Louis XIV. seeking to acquire rights in the Palatinate, and subsequently in Bavaria.
The father of Élisabeth-Charlotte, after parting from his wife, married morganatically Louise de Degenfeld, by whom he had five sons and three daughters,—these children being of course excluded from the succession. Madame, in her ill-assorted and personally mortifying marriage, of which she bravely strove to make the best, found all her comfort in writing letters, a very small portion of which have been preserved. All those addressed during her married life to her beloved aunt, the Electress of Hanover, have disappeared, probably destroyed by the judicious aunt herself, for Madame alludes to them as containing secrets she did not write to others. Among the many personages to whom she wrote habitually were: Duke Antoine Ulrich of Brunswick; her two unmarried half-sisters, Louise and Amélie, Countesses Palatine; her step-daughters, to whom she was warmly attached, Marie-Louise, wife of Charles II., King of Spain, and Anne-Marie, wife of Victor-Amadeus, Duke of Savoie and King of Sardinia and Sicily (the mother of Marie-Adélaïde, Duchesse de Bourgogne); and her own daughter, the Duchesse de Lorraine. Besides these, she had a number of correspondents on the other side of the Rhine, such as her cousins the Queen of Prussia and the Duchess of Modena; her old governess in Hanover; Leibnitz in Leipzig; also the Princess of Wales, Wilhelmina-Caroline of Brandebourg-Anspach, in London.
Of these letters (scarcely any remaining extant except those to her half-sisters) fragments first appeared at Stuttgard in 1789, subsequently in Paris, in 1807, 1823, 1832. In 1843 the first edition in a volume was published at Stuttgard by M. Wolfgang Menzel, a translation of which by M. Brunet appeared in Paris in 1853. That translation was made from the German volume, the original letters having disappeared in a conflagration. A subsequent edition, with a few insignificant additions as mentioned above, appeared a few years later, from the last issue of which the present translation has been selected.
M. Brunet remarks in his preface, that “Madame had the habit of reproducing almost in the same terms the details which she gave of the same events to diverse persons. She wrote with extreme rapidity, passing, without any transition, from one subject to another, piling up useless words and insignificant particulars which it would be quite absurd to try to reproduce. Expressions of regret at the deaths or the illnesses of Madame’s numerous relatives, interminable protestations of friendship, wearisome repetitions, swelled beyond all measure the letters that came into the hands of M. Menzel, who cut off two-thirds of them, preserving such parts only as had a more or less general interest and an historical value.”
The following letters are almost exclusively addressed to her half-sisters, and chiefly to the Comtesse Louise, the Comtesse Amélie having died in 1709. The names of her correspondents do not precede the letters in the French edition, except in a few instances.
Madame needs no interpreter, for even her vituperative faculty conveys its own correction; her hatred to Mme. de Maintenon becomes amusing, and we are quite able to see the justice and the injustice of it. Her favourite term for her enemy is, however, so outrageous (la vieille guenipe, the old slut, or any such equivalent—once she descends to saying la vieille truie) that it is more agreeable to the reader to keep the word in French than to constantly repeat it in English.
Madame died on the 8th of December, 1722, at the age of seventy, just one year before the death of her son, the regent. She was buried in Saint-Denis, and Massillon pronounced her funeral oration.
The letters of Adélaïde de Savoie, Duchesse de Bourgogne and dauphine, are of little value, as the reader will see, if judged historically, or as a document on the manners and customs of a period. They are placed here as a contemporary record of a tender and pathetic young life on its passage, through frivolity and ill-health, to a premature death just as age had corrected her defects, and the prospect of being, with her husband, the blessing and salvation of France was dawning before her.
Sainte-Beuve possessed a natural spirit of justice which led him (though it did not invariably rule him) to satisfy his literary conscience by returning to the portraits of his personages to correct, modify, and balance his first impressions. It is in this spirit that his picture of Mme. de Maintenon and Saint-Cyr, followed by a number of her own letters and papers on that section of her life, are given here to succeed the prejudiced statements of her two greatest enemies, Saint-Simon and Madame. The picture of Saint-Cyr stands apart in Mme. de Maintenon’s career in a frame of its own; it shows her at her very best and as she herself would fain appear to posterity. It is the other extreme of the portraiture, and the reader must form his own judgment as to how the full truth of the nature and conduct of this remarkable woman can be evolved.