"The novelty of seeing a great lady of the Court commenting on the most obscure of the apostles caused every one to buy the book."[21] It ended by the Archbishop of Paris intimating to the "Order of the Conferences" that they "would better leave Theology to the Sorbonne."
Mlle. Des Jardins declaimed her verses in the salons with great "contortions" and with eyes rolling as if in death; and she was not at all pleased when people preferred Corneille's writings to her own.
Mlle. Diodée frightened her hearers so that they took to their heels when she began to read her fine thoughts on Zoroaster or on Hermes Trismegistus. Another learned lady would speak of nothing but solar or lunar eclipses and of comets.
The pedantry of this high order of representative woman transported the "honest man" with horror. The higher the birth of the man the greater his fear lest by some occult means he might be led to slip his neck into the noose of a "Savante." But there was one counter-irritant for this virulent form of literary eruption. The young girls of the highest nobility were all extremely ignorant. Mlle. de Maillé-Brézé, niece of Cardinal de Richelieu, had not an idea of the most limited degree of the knowledge of books when she married the great Condé (1641). She knew nothing whatever. It was considered that ignorance carried to such length proved that neglect of instruction had gone too far, and when the great Condé went on his first campaign, friends seized the opportunity to add a few facets to the uncut jewel. She was turned and turned about, viewed in different lights, and polished so that her qualities could be seen to the best advantage. "The year after her marriage," says Mlle. de Scudéry, "she was sent to the Convent of the Carmelite Nuns of Saint Denis, to be taught to learn to read and write, during the absence of Monsieur her husband."
The Contes de Perrault—faithful mirror of the habits of those days—teaches us what an accomplished princess ought to be like. All the fairies to be found in the country had acted as godmothers to the Belle-au-Bois-dormant,
so that each one of them could bring her a gift ... consequently the princess had acquired every imaginable perfection.... The youngest fairy gave her the gift of being the most beautiful woman in the world; the one who came next gave her the spirit of an angel; the third endowed her with power to be graceful in everything that she did; the fourth gave her the art of dancing like a fairy; the fifth the art of singing like a nightingale; and the sixth endowed her with the power to play all kinds of instruments to perfection.
Perrault had traced his portraits over the strongly defined lines of real life. La Grande Mademoiselle was trained after the manner of the Belle-au-Bois-dormant. Her governess had had too much experience to burden her with a science that would have made her redoubtable in the eyes of men; so she had transferred to the fairies the task of providing her young charge with a suitable investiture. Unhappily for her eternal fame, when she distributed her powers of attorney some of the fairies were absent; so Mademoiselle neither sang like a nightingale, nor displayed classic grace in all her actions. But her resemblance to Perrault's heroines was striking. The fairies empowered to invest her with mind and delicacy of feeling had been present at her baptism, and they had left indisputable proof of the origin of her ideas. Like their predecessors, the elves of the Contes, they had never planned for anything less than the marriage of their god-daughter to the King's son. By all that she saw and heard, Mademoiselle knew that Providence had not closed an eye at the moment of her creation. She knew that her quality was essential. She knew that it was written on high that she should marry the son of a great King.
Her life was a conscientious struggle to "accomplish the oracle"; and the marriages that she missed form the weft of her history.
VI