Such as she is, with all her coarseness and her contradictions on a basis of virtue and honour, Madame is a useful, a precious, and an incomparable witness as to manners and morals. She gives a hand to Saint-Simon and to Dangeau—nearer, however, to the former than to the latter. She has heart; do not ask charm of her, but say: “That Court would have lacked the most original of figures and of voices if Madame had not been of it.” Arriving at Versailles at the moment when the La Vallière star declined and was eclipsed, and seeing only the last of the brilliant years, she enters little into that era of refinement which touches the imagination; but lacking that refinement, and solely through her frankness, she lays bare to us the second half of Louis XIV.’s reign under its human, most human, natural, and—to say the whole truth—its material aspect. She strips that great century of its idealism, she strips it too much; she goes almost to the point of degrading it—if we listen to her alone. As time goes on, and the delicacy and purity of manners and language retire more and more into Mme. de Maintenon’s corner and seek at last a refuge at Saint-Cyr, Madame holds herself aloof at Saint-Cloud, and again aloof in the Palais-Royal, and thence—whether at the close of Louis XIV.’s reign or under the regency—she makes, lance in hand, and her pen behind her ear, valiant and frequent sorties in that blunt style which is all her own, which wears a beard upon its chin, and of which we know not rightly whether it derives from Luther or from Rabelais, though we are very sure it is the opposite of that of Mme. de Caylus and her like.
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE.
Sainte-Beuve, in his essay on Madame, suggested to the French editor of her letters that he should make a more complete collection of them. M. Brunet professes to have done so in the edition from which this translation is selected.[2] But when examined the additions prove very insignificant, and the arrangement, though apparently more chronological, interferes with the interest of the reader. Passages which seem to belong together are cut up into sentences and scattered singly over weeks and months; so that the point of Madame’s racy representations is often weakened. In this translation parts of the letters of each year on a given topic are put together, so as to offer a better picture of Madame’s thought; as for her nature, she gives that herself, and no one can better the portrait.
Nothing need be added to Sainte-Beuve’s admirable essay beyond a brief account of Madame’s parentage, family relations, and the history, such as it is, of her correspondence.
She was born at Heidelberg in 1652. Soon after her birth, her father, Charles-Louis, Elector Palatine, parted from his wife, Charlotte of Hesse-Cassel, and the little daughter, Élisabeth-Charlotte, was given to the care of her father’s sister, Sophia, Electress of Hanover (mother of George I. of England); with whom she remained until her marriage, against her wishes, in 1671, to Monsieur, brother of Louis XIV., after the death of his first wife, Henrietta, daughter of Charles I. of England. The marriage was political,—Louis XIV. seeking to acquire rights in the Palatinate, and subsequently in Bavaria.
The father of Élisabeth-Charlotte, after parting from his wife, married morganatically Louise de Degenfeld, by whom he had five sons and three daughters,—these children being of course excluded from the succession. Madame, in her ill-assorted and personally mortifying marriage, of which she bravely strove to make the best, found all her comfort in writing letters, a very small portion of which have been preserved. All those addressed during her married life to her beloved aunt, the Electress of Hanover, have disappeared, probably destroyed by the judicious aunt herself, for Madame alludes to them as containing secrets she did not write to others. Among the many personages to whom she wrote habitually were: Duke Antoine Ulrich of Brunswick; her two unmarried half-sisters, Louise and Amélie, Countesses Palatine; her step-daughters, to whom she was warmly attached, Marie-Louise, wife of Charles II., King of Spain, and Anne-Marie, wife of Victor-Amadeus, Duke of Savoie and King of Sardinia and Sicily (the mother of Marie-Adélaïde, Duchesse de Bourgogne); and her own daughter, the Duchesse de Lorraine. Besides these, she had a number of correspondents on the other side of the Rhine, such as her cousins the Queen of Prussia and the Duchess of Modena; her old governess in Hanover; Leibnitz in Leipzig; also the Princess of Wales, Wilhelmina-Caroline of Brandebourg-Anspach, in London.
Of these letters (scarcely any remaining extant except those to her half-sisters) fragments first appeared at Stuttgard in 1789, subsequently in Paris, in 1807, 1823, 1832. In 1843 the first edition in a volume was published at Stuttgard by M. Wolfgang Menzel, a translation of which by M. Brunet appeared in Paris in 1853. That translation was made from the German volume, the original letters having disappeared in a conflagration. A subsequent edition, with a few insignificant additions as mentioned above, appeared a few years later, from the last issue of which the present translation has been selected.
M. Brunet remarks in his preface, that “Madame had the habit of reproducing almost in the same terms the details which she gave of the same events to diverse persons. She wrote with extreme rapidity, passing, without any transition, from one subject to another, piling up useless words and insignificant particulars which it would be quite absurd to try to reproduce. Expressions of regret at the deaths or the illnesses of Madame’s numerous relatives, interminable protestations of friendship, wearisome repetitions, swelled beyond all measure the letters that came into the hands of M. Menzel, who cut off two-thirds of them, preserving such parts only as had a more or less general interest and an historical value.”