“L’ABBESSE UNIVERSELLE”: MADAME DE MAINTENON
Few of the outstanding names in history have received the hard measure which has been meted out to Madame de Maintenon’s. She has had it, so to speak, both ways; been blamed for what she did not, and for what she did. First, she was to be held abominable because she was not the King’s wife; next, and even more so, because she was. All that falls to the ground if it can be shown that her life before the marriage was as irreproachable, morally, as it was after it. Madame Saint-René Taillandier, in a recent admirable study of the misjudged lady, has no difficulty in proving that it was so. She proves it positively by showing of what nature Madame de Maintenon really was, and negatively by exploring all possible sources of contemporary evidence, and finding nothing worth consideration. Dull, narrow, bigoted, obstinate, over-busy about many things, more occupied with to-day than to-morrow, falling in too readily with Louis’ view of himself and his place in the universe (a view which she shared with the entire French nation)—these things she may have been, and done. But she was a good woman, a pious woman, one who was severely tried, one who did her immediate duty and gave to the poor. She had a long and unhappy life, and died worn out. There can be no doubt of all this. All sorts of reasons for hating and slandering her can be urged: none of them good ones.
The reproaches of the historians are not so summarily to be dismissed. It is not necessary to go so far as Michelet did when he said that the price of her marriage with Louis was the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. That’s absurd. Madame de Maintenon neither bargained nor sold her hand. But it is hard to believe—impossible to believe—that she was not in consultation with the King, and Louvois, and the priests about the Revocation, or that, if consulted, she would not have urged it. Saint-Simon, who is her first accuser here, is writing after her death, and writing as an historian. I feel sure that he is right. It is, of course, true that she was a Huguenot by descent, a grand-daughter of that truculent, serio-comic old Agrippa d’Aubigné, whose portrait, savagely grinning, is so extraordinarily like those of his king, le Béarnais; and it is true also that, though she was converted before she was a grown woman, she never lost her fanatic hold upon religion, but simply changed its direction. Throughout her life, says Madame Taillandier, she showed Huguenot characteristics. She could never take to the devotion of the rosary; she could never find any enthusiasm for convents; she invoked neither the Virgin nor the Saints; continued the reading of her Bible. No matter for that: she was hungry for souls. As Saint-Simon puts it, with evident truth: “Elle eut la maladie des directions ... elle se croyait l’abbesse universelle.... Elle se figurait être une mère d’église.” She converted whomsoever she could touch, and as she grew in influence she could touch a many. Concerned in the Revocation, besides Louis, there were Louvois, Father le Tellier, Bossuet, her own spiritual director, the Bishop of Chartres, and all the Jesuits. Everything that we know about her shows to which side she would incline; and nothing that we know about her makes it likely that she had any conception what statesmanship meant. Louis called her “Sa Solidité.” Her solidity showed itself in her care for detail: nothing was too small for her—she loved to order a household, knew how many chickens you should get in for a small family, how much wine for the servants, how many pounds of candles. She could design the quasi-conventual robes for Saint-Cyr, costumes for ballets and so on. But the economic or political outcome of the Revocation of the Edict; the ruin of her country, the humiliation of the King, all the immediate results of the “affreux complot” were entirely outside her power of vision. “Four regiments of infantry,” Madame Taillandier pleasantly says, “two of cavalry were ordered to follow the Duc de Noailles into Languedoc, and trample a little on the Huguenots.” My italics! Well, Madame de Maintenon expected to save souls like that. I don’t think that she can be let off her share in the dragonnades, or in the Revocation.
Never mind. She was more of a saint than a sinner, though she lacked the severity and suavity, the “sweet reasonableness” of the true Saints. She was bleak, in herself and in her outlook; her life had always been, and after her marriage was long to be, cheerless and unutterably dull. What a life it was, throughout its eighty-three years! Born in a prison in 1635, and living thereafter on charity, with one relative or another; hounded from Huguenot pillar to Catholic post; clinging to the faith in which she had been reared until she was “converted” almost literally by force; still a pauper, often a drudge; then at seventeen married to an elderly balladist, crippled by disease, Paul Scarron, a scribbler of pasquinades and squibs, author of a travesty of Virgil and what not; married to this incapacitated rip; living with him in Grub Street on what he could pick up by the hire of his pen—a libel here, a dedication there, a lampoon elsewhere, a broadside for the street corner or bridge-end; living so from hand to mouth, married but not a wife—what a life for a young girl gently born, grand-daughter of King Henry’s old friend! Nothing is more pathetic in Madame Taillandier’s account of her than the gallant fight she put up in her little salon in the Rue Neuve Saint-Louis—polite conversation in her bed-chamber with her friends, while Paul and his tore the decencies to shreds below-stairs. And she succeeded, too, in making good and herself respected. She had valuable friends. Madame de Sévigné was one, Madame de Coulanges another, Madame de Lafayette a third. Through them she became acquainted with yet higher persons, among them with Madame de Montespan, then in league with the highest of all. By those means she fell under the King’s eye. He did not like, but he esteemed her, and chose her out of all the Court and all Paris to govern Madame de Montespan’s children. She did it, by all accounts, admirably. If she had no other qualities, she had two rare ones: she did her duty, and held her tongue.
When, by public Act, the children were made Enfants de France, they were removed from Paris to Saint-Germain; and there was Madame Scarron in daily intercourse with Louis. That was the beginning of her astounding ascent. Madame de Montespan was uneasy, and had reason to be. The gouvernante’s influence was steadily against her. Madame Scarron disapproved of her and all her kind; and sure enough, from the hour of her entry into the King’s family, the mistress’s star began to wane. Finally, what the preachers—Bossuet, Bourdaloue—could not do the ghastly business of “the Poisons” settled. La Montespan was in that up to the neck, and Louis knew that she was, and held his peace, not to save her neck, but to save his face. Montespan was exiled, and took, as George Meredith said, “to religion and little dogs.” Madame Scarron remained in charge of the children, and was ennobled with a fief and a Marquisate. The Court called her “Madame de Maintenant”—but she had not fully earned that. The Queen died—and Louis almost immediately married the Marquise. There is not a ghost of a doubt of it. Saint-Simon gives the date, the hour, and the names of celebrant, assistants, and witnesses. Everybody knew it—but nothing was said. From that hour Louis was hardly ever out of her company until the end, when she was forced to leave him before the breath was out of his body.
What did she gain except unutterable weariness, suspicion, fear, slander, and unending labour? Read Dangeau’s diary of the dreary, splendid routine of Versailles, Marly and Fontainebleau; read in Madame Taillandier a letter from the poor woman describing one of her days. She had her Saint-Cyr in which she really delighted. She could play universal Abbess there, and be interested and at peace for a time. But even there chagrin and disappointment dogged her. She brought in Madame Guyon, Quietism, and other things taboo. She became involved in Fénélon’s disgrace; and presently she had to submit to Rome and turn her beloved “Institution” of ladies into a convent of nuns.
No—she was bleak, and had a narrow mind; but, as she saw her duty, so she did it. Her duty led her into thorny wastes and desert places; it led her to be one of the thousand idle parasites yawning and stretching at Versailles, slowly and endlessly revolving like dead moons round le Roi Soleil. We may pity Madame de Maintenon for what life made of her, but not blame her.