There is a deal of anxiety to make study agreeable! Jacqueline directs her pupils to work at the very things that are most repulsive, because the work that will please God the most is that which will please them the least. The exterior manifestations of friendship are forbidden, and possibly friendship itself. “Our pupils shall shun every sort of familiarity one towards another.”
Instruction is reduced to the catechism, to the application of the Christian virtues, to reading, and to writing. Arithmetic is not taught save on holidays. It seems that memory is the only faculty that Jacqueline wishes to have developed. “This opens their minds, gives them occupation, and keeps them from evil thoughts.” Have we not reason to say that at Port Royal women have less value than men! What a distance between the solid instruction of Lancelot’s and Nicole’s pupils and the ignorance of Jacqueline Pascal’s! Even when the men of Port Royal speak of the education of women, they have more liberal ideas than those which are applied at their side. Nicole declares that books are necessary even in convents for girls, because it is necessary “to sustain prayer by reading.”
231. General Character of Saint Cyr.—In leaving Port Royal for Saint Cyr, we seem, on coming out of a profound night, to perceive a ray of light. Without doubt, Madame de Maintenon has not yet, as a teacher, all that breadth of view that could be desired. Her work is far from being faultless, but the founding of Saint Cyr (1686) was none the less a considerable innovation. “Saint Cyr,” it has been said, “is not a convent. It is a great establishment devoted to the lay education of young women of noble birth; it is a bold and intelligent secularization of the education of women.” There is some excess of praise in this statement, and the lay character of Saint Cyr is very questionable. Lavallée, an admirer, could write: “The instructions of Madame de Maintenon are doubtless too religious, too monastic.” Let us grant, however, that Madame de Maintenon, who, after having founded Saint Cyr, was the director of it, extra muros, and even taught there, at stated times, is personally the first lay teacher of France. Let us grant, also, that at least in the beginning, and up to 1692, the women entrusted with the work of instruction were not nuns in the absolute sense of the term. They were not bound by solemn and absolute vows.
But this character relatively laic, and this rupture with monastic traditions, were not maintained during the whole life of the institution.
232. Two Periods in the History of Saint Cyr.—Saint Cyr, in fact, passed, within a few years, through two very different periods, and Madame de Maintenon followed in succession two almost opposite currents. For the first years, from 1686 to 1692, the spirit of the institution is broad and liberal; the education is brilliant, perhaps too much so; literary exercises and dramatic representations have an honored place. Saint Cyr is an institution inclining to worldliness, better fitted to train women of intellect than good economists and housewives. Madame de Maintenon quickly saw that she had taken a false route, and, from 1692, she reacted, not without excess, against the tendencies which she had at first obeyed. She conceived an extreme distrust of literary studies, and cut off all she could from the instruction, in order to give her entire thought to the moral and practical qualities of her pupils. Saint Cyr became a convent, with a little more liberty, doubtless, than there was in the other monasteries of the time, but it was a convent still.
233. Dramatic Representations.—It was the notorious success of the performance of Andromaque and Esther that caused the overthrow of the original intentions of Madame de Maintenon. Esther, in particular, was the great event of the first years of Saint Cyr. Racine distributed the parts; Boileau conducted the training in elocution; and the entire Court, the king at the head, came to applaud and entertain the pretty actresses, who left nothing undone to please their spectators. Heads were a little turned by all this; dissipation crept into the school. The pupils were no longer willing to sing in church, for fear of spoiling their voices. Evidently the route was now over a dangerous declivity. The institution had been turned from its purpose. Matters were in a way to establish, under another form, another Hôtel de Rambouillet.[143]
234. Reform of 1692.—At the first, as we have seen, the ladies of Saint Louis, charged with the direction of Saint Cyr, did not found a monastic order properly so-called; but, when Madame de Maintenon resolved to reform the general spirit of the house, she thought it necessary to transform Saint Cyr into a monastery, and she founded the Order of Saint Augustine.
But what she changed in particular was the moral discipline, and the programme of studies.