VI.
In order to console ourselves here, we have read some charming letters; here is one of them from the little Duc du Maine, seven years old, whom Mme. de Maintenon had brought here to be cured. He wrote to his mother Mme. de Montespan, and the letter must certainly pass under the king’s eyes. What a school of style was that court!
“I am going off to write all the news of the house for thy diversion, my dear little heart, and I shall write far better when I shall think that it is for you, madame. Mme. de Maintenon spends all her time in spinning, and, if they would let her, she would also give up her nights to it, or to writing. She toils daily for my mind; she has good hope of making something of it, and the darling too, who will do all he can to have some brains, for he is dying with the desire of pleasing the king and you. On the way here I read the history of Cæsar, am at present reading that of Alexander, and shall soon commence that of Pompey. La Couture does not like to lend me Mme. de Maintenon’s petticoats, when I want to disguise myself as a girl. I have received the letter you write to the dear little darling; I was delighted with it; I will do what you bid me, if only to please you, for I love you superlatively. I was, and am still, charmed with the little nod that the king gave me on leaving, but was very ill pleased that thou didst not seem to me sorry: thou wast beautiful as an angel.”
Could any one be more gracious, more flattering, insinuating or precocious? To please was a necessity at that time, to please people of the world, quick-witted people. Never were men more agreeable; because there was never greater need of being agreeable. This youth, brought up among petticoats, took on from the beginning a woman’s vivacity, her coquetry and smiles. You see that he gets upon their knees, receives and gives embraces, and is amusing; there is no prettier trinket in the salon.
Mme. de Maintenon, devout, circumspect and politic, also writes, but with the clearness and brevity of a worldly abbess or a president in petticoats. “You see that I take courage in a place more frightful than I can tell you; to crown the misery, we are freezing here. The company is poor; they respect and bore us. All the women are ill continually; they are loungers who have found the world really great as soon as ever they have been at Etampes.”
We have amused ourselves with this raillery, dry, disdainful, clear-cut and somewhat too short, and I have maintained to Paul that Mme. de Maintenon resembles the yews at Versailles, brushy extinguishers that are too closely clipped. Whereupon I spoke very ill of the landscapes of the seventeenth century, of Le Nôtre, Poussin and his architectural nature, Leclerc, Perelle, and of their abstract, conventional trees, whose majestically rounded foliage agrees with that of no known species. He lectured me severely, according to his custom, and called me narrow-minded; he maintains that all is beautiful; that all that is necessary is to put yourself at the right point of view. His reasoning was nearly as follows:
He claims that things please us by contrast, and that beautiful things are different for different souls. “One day,” said he, “I was travelling with some English people in Champagne, on a cloudy day in September. They found the plains horrible, and I admirable. The dull fields stretched out like a sea to the very verge of the horizon, without encountering a hill. The stalks of the close-reaped wheat dyed the earth with a wan yellow; the plain seemed covered with an old wet mantle. Here were lines of deformed elms; here and there a meagre square of fir-trees; further off a cottage of chalk with its white pool: from furrow to furrow the sun trailed its sickly light, and the earth, emptied of its fruits, was like a woman dead in child-bed whose infant they have taken away.
