The following letters are almost exclusively addressed to her half-sisters, and chiefly to the Comtesse Louise, the Comtesse Amélie having died in 1709. The names of her correspondents do not precede the letters in the French edition, except in a few instances.
Madame needs no interpreter, for even her vituperative faculty conveys its own correction; her hatred to Mme. de Maintenon becomes amusing, and we are quite able to see the justice and the injustice of it. Her favourite term for her enemy is, however, so outrageous (la vieille guenipe, the old slut, or any such equivalent—once she descends to saying la vieille truie) that it is more agreeable to the reader to keep the word in French than to constantly repeat it in English.
Madame died on the 8th of December, 1722, at the age of seventy, just one year before the death of her son, the regent. She was buried in Saint-Denis, and Massillon pronounced her funeral oration.
The letters of Adélaïde de Savoie, Duchesse de Bourgogne and dauphine, are of little value, as the reader will see, if judged historically, or as a document on the manners and customs of a period. They are placed here as a contemporary record of a tender and pathetic young life on its passage, through frivolity and ill-health, to a premature death just as age had corrected her defects, and the prospect of being, with her husband, the blessing and salvation of France was dawning before her.
Sainte-Beuve possessed a natural spirit of justice which led him (though it did not invariably rule him) to satisfy his literary conscience by returning to the portraits of his personages to correct, modify, and balance his first impressions. It is in this spirit that his picture of Mme. de Maintenon and Saint-Cyr, followed by a number of her own letters and papers on that section of her life, are given here to succeed the prejudiced statements of her two greatest enemies, Saint-Simon and Madame. The picture of Saint-Cyr stands apart in Mme. de Maintenon’s career in a frame of its own; it shows her at her very best and as she herself would fain appear to posterity. It is the other extreme of the portraiture, and the reader must form his own judgment as to how the full truth of the nature and conduct of this remarkable woman can be evolved.