The King was not only sacred, but he was supposed to have different blood in his veins from other men. His person was inviolable. He reigned, it was universally supposed, by divine right. He was a divinely commissioned personage, like Saul and David. He did not reign because he was able or powerful or wealthy, because he was a statesman or a general, but because he had a right to reign which no one disputed. This adoration of royalty was not only universal, but it was deeply seated in the minds of men, and marked strongly all the courtiers and generals and bishops and poets who surrounded the throne of Louis,--Bossuet and Fénelon, as well as Colbert and Louvois; Racine and Molière, as well as Condé and Turenne. Especially the nobility of the realm looked up to the king as the source and centre of their own honors and privileges. Even the people were proud to recognize in him a sort of divinity, and all persons stood awe-struck in the presence of royalty. All this reverence was based on ideas which have ever moved the world,--such as sustained popes in the Middle Ages, and emperors in ancient Borne, and patriarchal rule among early Oriental peoples. Religion, as well as law and patriotism, invested monarchs with this sacred and inalienable authority, never greater than when Louis XIV. began to reign.
But with all his grandeur Louis XIV. did not know how to avail himself of the advantages which fortune and accident placed in his way. He was simply magnificent, like Xerxes,--like a man who had entered into a vast inheritance which he did not know what to do with. He had no profound views of statesmanship, like Augustus or Tiberius. He had no conception of what the true greatness of a country consisted in. Hence his vast treasures were spent in useless wars, silly pomps, and inglorious pleasures. His grand court became the scene of cabals and rivalries, scandals and follies. His wars, from which he expected glory, ended only in shame; his great generals passed away without any to take their place; his people, instead of being enriched by a development of national resources, became poor and discontented; while his persecutions decimated his subjects and sowed the seeds of future calamities. Even the learned men who shed lustre around his throne prostituted their talents to nurse his egotism, and did but little to elevate the national character. Neither Pascal with his intense hostility to spiritual despotism, nor Racine with the severe taste which marked the classic authors of Greece and Rome, nor Fénelon with his patriotic enthusiasm and clear perception of the moral strength of empires, dared to give full scope to his genius, but all were obliged to veil their sentiments in vague panegyrics of ancient heroes. At the close of the seventeenth century the great intellectual lights had disappeared under the withering influences of despotism,--as in ancient Rome under the emperors all manly independence had fled,--and literature went through an eclipse. That absorbing egotism which made Louis XIV. jealous of the fame of Condé and Luxembourg, or fearful of the talents of Louvois and Colbert, or suspicious of the influence of Racine and Fénelon, also led him to degrade his nobility by menial offices, and institute in his court a burdensome formality.
In spite of his great abilities, no monarch ever reaped a severer penalty for his misgovernment than did Louis. Like Solomon, he lived long enough to see the bursting of all the bubbles which had floated before his intoxicated brain. All his delusions were dispelled; he was oppressed with superstitious fears; he was weary of the very pleasures of which he once was fondest; he saw before him a gulf of national disasters; he was obliged to melt up the medallions which commemorated his victories, to furnish bread for starving soldiers; he lost the provinces he had seized; he saw the successive defeat of all his marshals and the annihilation of his veteran armies; he was deprived of his children and grandchildren by the most dreadful malady known to that generation; a feeble infant was the heir of his dominions; he saw nothing before him but national disgrace; he found no counsellors whom he could trust, no friends to whom he could pour out his sorrows; the infirmities of age oppressed his body; the agonies of remorse disturbed his soul; the fear of hell became the foundation of his religion, for he must have felt that he had a fearful reckoning with the King of kings.
Such was the man to whom the best days of Madame de Maintenon were devoted; and she shared his confidence to the last. She did all she could to alleviate his sorrows, for a more miserable man than Louis XIV. during the last twenty years of his life never was seated on a throne. Well might his wife exclaim, "Save those who occupy the highest places, I know of none more unhappy than those who envy them." This great woman attempted to make her husband a religious man, and succeeded so far as a rigid regard to formalities and technical observances can make a man religious.
It may be asked how this formal and proper woman was enabled to exert upon the King so great an influence; for she was the real ruler of the land. No woman ever ruled with more absolute sway, from Queen Esther to Madame de Pompadour, than did the widow of the profane and crippled Scarron. It cannot be doubted that she exerted this influence by mere moral and intellectual force,--the power of physical beauty retreating before the superior radiance of wisdom and virtue. La Vallière had wearied and Montespan had disgusted even a sensual king, with all their remarkable attractions; but Maintenon, by her prudence, her tact, her wisdom, and her friendship, retained the empire she had won,--thus teaching the immortal lesson that nothing but respect constitutes a sure foundation for love, or can hold the heart of a selfish man amid the changes of life. Whatever the promises made emphatic by passion, whatever the presents or favors given as tokens of everlasting ties, whatever the raptures consecrating the endearments of a plighted troth, whatever the admiration called out by the scintillations of genius, whatever the gratitude arising from benefits bestowed in sympathy, all will vanish in the heart of a man unless confirmed by qualities which extort esteem,--the most impressive truth that can be presented to the mind of woman; her encouragement if good, her sentence to misery if bad, so far as her hopes centre around an earthly idol.
Now, Madame de Maintenon, whatever her defects, her pharisaism, her cunning, her ambition, and her narrow religious intolerance, was still, it would seem, always respected, not only by the King himself,--a great discerner of character,--but by the court which she controlled, and even by that gay circle of wits who met around the supper-tables of her first husband. The breath of scandal never tarnished her reputation; she was admired by priests as well as by nobles. From this fact, which is well attested, we infer that she acted with transcendent discretion as the governess of the Duke of Maine, even when brought into the most intimate relations with the King; and that when reigning at the court after the death of the Queen, she must have been supposed to have a right to all the attentions which she received from Louis XIV. And what is very remarkable about this woman is, that she should so easily have supplanted Madame de Montespan in the full blaze of her dazzling beauty, when the King was in the maturity of his power and in all the pride of external circumstance,--she, born a Protestant, converted to Catholicism in her youth under protest, poor, dependent, a governess, the widow of a vulgar buffoon, and with antecedents which must have stung to the quick so proud a man as was Louis XIV. With his severe taste, his experience, his discernment, with all the cynical and hostile influences of a proud and worldly court, and after a long and searching intimacy, it is hard to believe that he could have loved and honored her to his death if she had not been worthy of his esteem. And when we remember that for nearly forty years she escaped the scandals which made those times unique in infamy, we are forced to concede that on the whole she must have been a good woman. To retain such unbounded power for over thirty years is a very remarkable thing to do.
Madame de Maintenon, however, though wise and virtuous, made many grave mistakes, as she had many defects of character. Great as she was, she has to answer for political crimes into which, from her narrow religious prejudices, she led the King.
The most noticeable feature in the influence which Madame de Maintenon exercised on the King was in inciting a spirit of religious intolerance. And this appeared even long before Madame de Montespan had lost her ascendency. For ten years before the revocation of the Edict of Nantes there had been continual persecution of the Protestants in France, on the ground that they were heretics, though not rebels. And the same persecuting spirit was displayed in reference to the Jansenists, who were Catholics, and whose only sin was intellectual boldness. Anybody who thought differently from the monarch incurred the royal displeasure. Intellectual freedom and honesty were the real reasons of the disgrace of Racine and Fénelon. For the King was a bigot in religion as well as a despot on a throne. He fancied that he was very pious. He was regular in all his religious duties. He was an earnest and conscientious adherent to all the doctrines of the Catholic Church. In his judgment, a departure from those doctrines should be severely punished. He was as sincere as Torquemada, or Alva, or Saint Dominic. His wife encouraged this bigotry, and even stimulated his resentments toward those who differed from him.
At last, in 1685, the fatal blow was struck which decimated the subjects of an irresponsible king. The glorious edict which Henry IV. had granted, and which even Richelieu and Mazarin had respected, was repealed. There was no political necessity for the crime. It sprang from unalloyed religious intolerance; and it was as suicidal as it was uncalled for and cruel. It was an immense political blunder, which no enlightened monarch would ever have committed, and which none but a cold and narrow woman would ever have encouraged. There was no excuse or palliation for this abominable persecution any more than there was for the burning of John Huss. It had not even as much to justify it as had the slaughter of St. Bartholomew, for the Huguenots were politically hostile and dangerous. It was an act of wanton cruelty incited by religious bigotry. I wonder how a woman so kind-hearted, so intelligent, and so politic as Madame de Maintenon doubtless was, could have encouraged the King to a measure which undermined his popularity, which cut the sinews of natural strength, and raised up implacable enemies in every Protestant country. I can palliate her detestable bigotry only on the ground that she was the slave of an order of men who have ever proved themselves to be the inveterate foes of human freedom, and who marked their footsteps, wherever they went, by a trail of blood. Louis was equally their blinded tool. The Order--the "Society of Jesus"--was created to extirpate heresy, and in this instance it was carried out to the bitter end. The persecution of the Protestants under Louis XIV. was the most cruel and successful of all known persecutions in ancient or modern times. It annihilated the Protestants, so far as there were any left openly to defend their cause. It drove out of France from two hundred thousand to four hundred thousand of her best people, and executed or confined to the galleys as many more, They died like sheep led to the slaughter; they died not with arms, but Bibles, in their hands. I have already presented some details of that inglorious persecution in my lecture on Louis XIV., and will not repeat what I there said. It was deemed by Madame de Maintenon a means of grace to the King,--for in her way she always sought his conversion. And when the bloody edict went forth for the slaughter of the best people in the land, she wrote that "the King was now beginning to think seriously of his salvation. If God preserve him, there will be no longer but one religion in the kingdom." This foul stain on her character did not proceed from cruelty of disposition, but from mistaken zeal. What a contrast her conduct was to the policy of Elizabeth! Yet she was no worse than Le Tellier, La Chaise, and other fanatics. Religious intolerance was one of the features of the age and of the Roman Catholic Church.
But religious bigotry is eternally odious to enlightened reason. No matter how interesting a man or woman may be in most respects, if stained with cruel intolerance in religious opinions, he or she will be repulsive. It left an indelible stain on the character of the most brilliant and gifted woman of her times, and makes us forget her many virtues. With all her excellences, she goes down in history as a cold and intolerant woman whom we cannot love. We cannot forget that in a great degree through her influence the Edict of Nantes was repealed.