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 toward it with an even step. 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 incomparable 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 de La Vallière 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. Alone she 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. 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.
The chief ornament of the Court of Versailles was the duchess of Burgundy. For the king and for Madame de Maintenon, the great and inexhaustible attraction of this young lady was her gaiety and unconstrained ease, tempered by the most delicate respect, which, on coming as quite a child to France from the court of Savoy, she 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 chairs, 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 in to 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 any body. 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” [Mémoires de St. Simon].
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 pleasure 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.
Flattery, at Versailles, 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 hey-day 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 it 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 toward regularity, propriety, order; all the responsibility for it has 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.
It was 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.
But the time came for Madame des Ursins to make definitive trial of fortune’s inconstancy. After having enjoyed unlimited power and influence, 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.
“One has no more luck at our age,” Louis XIV. had said to his old friend, Marshal Villars, returning from his most disastrous campaign. It was a bitter reflection upon himself which had put these words into the king’s mouth. After the most brilliant, the most continually and invariably triumphant of reigns, he began to see fortune slipping away from him and the grievous consequences of his errors successively overwhelming the state. “God is punishing me, I have richly deserved it,” he said to Marshal Villars, who was on the point of setting out for the battle of Denain. The aged king, dispirited and beaten, could not set down to men his misfortunes and reverses; the hand of God himself was raised against his house; death was knocking double knocks all round him. The grand-dauphin had for some days past been ill of small-pox; he died in April, 1711; the duchess of Burgundy was carried off by an attack of malignant fever in February, 1712; her husband followed her within a week, and their eldest child, the duke of Brittany, about a month afterward.
There was universal and sincere mourning in France and in Europe. The most sinister rumors circulated darkly; a base intrigue caused the duke of Orleans to be accused; people called to mind his taste for chemistry and even magic, his flagrant impiety, his scandalous debauchery; beside himself with grief and anger, he demanded of the king to be sent to the Bastile; the king refused curtly, coldly, not unmoved in his secret heart by the perfidious insinuations which made their way even to him, but too just and too sensible to entertain a hateful lie, which, nevertheless, lay heavy on the duke of Orleans to the end of his days.