“Mme. de Maintenon, who is the foundress of Saint-Cyr, always busy with the purpose of amusing the king, is constantly introducing some novelty among the little girls brought up in that establishment, of which it may be said that it is worthy of the grandeur of the king and of the mind of her who invented and who conducts it. But sometimes the best-invented things degenerate considerably; and that establishment which, now that we have become devout, is the abode of virtue and piety, may some day, without any profound prophesying, be that of debauchery and impiety. For to believe that three hundred young girls can live there until they are twenty years old with a Court full of eager young men at their very doors, especially when the authority of the king will no longer restrain them,—to believe, I say, that young women and young men can be so near to each other without jumping the walls is scarcely reasonable.”
It became necessary, after the success of “Esther,” and the instigation given to the Court, to make a step backward and return to the spirit of the foundation, fortifying it by more severe regulations. The danger of the neighbourhood of Saint-Cyr to Versailles was indeed great; it was of the utmost consequence that Mme. de La Fayette’s prophecy should not be fulfilled, and that the young ladies of Saint-Cyr should in no wise resemble those of M. Alexandre Dumas. The lesson that Mme. de Maintenon drew from the representations of “Esther,” and the invasion of the profane was henceforth to say and resay ceaselessly to her teachers: “Hide your pupils; do not let them be seen.”
From the passage of Racine through Saint-Cyr, and that of Fénelon, there resulted (from the point of view of the foundation and its object) a number of unsuitable things in the midst of their graces. Fénelon developed a taste for refined and subtile piety suited only for choice souls; Racine, without intending it, created a taste for reading, poesy, and all such things, the perfume of which is sweet, but the fruit not always salutary. Mme. de Maintenon, however influenced she might herself be by these tastes, recognized with her natural good sense the necessity of finding a remedy, and of not allowing those young and tender spirits, some of whom were already taken with the new ideas, to go farther in that direction. Among the first pupils and mistresses of Saint-Cyr was a certain Mme. de La Maisonfort, a distinguished woman, with an inquiring spirit, fond of investigating, and made for quite another career than that which she had chosen. She could not bring herself to renounce the gratifications of her mind and taste or the sensitiveness of her feelings. Mme. de Maintenon made war upon them in a number of very fine letters, which did not convince her. “How will you bear,” she writes to her, “the crosses that God will send you in the course of your life if a Norman or a Picard accent hinders you, or a man disgusts you because he is not as sublime as Racine? The latter, poor man, would have edified you could you have seen his humility during his illness, and his repentance for his search after intellect. He did not ask at such a time for a fashionable confessor; he saw none but a worthy priest of his own parish.” That example of the dying Racine did not work successfully. Mme. de La Maisonfort was one of those rare persons whom we see from time to time soaring to the summit of all the investigations of their epoch, supreme and refined judges of works of intellect, oracles and proselytes of the opinions in vogue. She could play charmingly at Jansenism with Racine and M. de Troisville, and distil Quietism with Fénelon, as in the eighteenth century she might have fallen in love with David Hume in company with the Comtesse de Boufflers, or in the nineteenth she would surely have shone in a doctrinaire salon discussing psychology and æstheticism, perhaps even going so far as the Fathers of the Church, not without adverting, as she passed, to socialism. Mme. de La Maisonfort, much as she was liked by Mme. de Maintenon, was, necessarily, dismissed from the Institute of Saint-Cyr.
Another mind, much better and much safer, that of Mme. de Glapion, was slightly affected by the new doctrines. “I have perceived,” Mme. de Maintenon writes to her, “the disgust you feel for your confessors; you think them vulgar; you want more brilliancy and delicacy; you wish to go to heaven by none but flowery paths.” Mme. de Glapion thought the Catechism rather grovelling and a little wanting in certain ways; it seemed to her ridiculous “that the master should put questions worthy of a scholar, and that the scholar should make the answers of a master.” She wished the question to be put by the child, who, after receiving the answer, should reason upon it and so be led from one investigation to another. Mme. de Glapion wished, as we see, to introduce the method of Descartes into theology. Mme. de Maintenon did not discuss the point; but she held up custom, experience, the impossibility of not stammering in such matters. “All those ideas,” she wrote to Mme. de Glapion, “are the remains of vanity. You do not like things common to all the world; your own mind is lofty, and you wish everything to be as lofty. Vain desire! The most learned theology cannot tell you more about the Trinity than you find in the Catechism. What you think and feel beyond that is a matter to be sacrificed; your spirit must become as simple as your heart. Employ your mind, not in multiplying your disgusts, but in conquering them, in concealing them until they are conquered, and in making yourself like the pleasures of your condition.” Mme. de Glapion succeeded in doing so. She was the consolation of Mme. de Maintenon and her truest inheritor; together with Madame du Pérou, she maintained at Saint-Cyr that spirit of precision and regularity combined with suavity and noble manners which distinguished the foundress, until long after the latter’s death. It may be said, definitively, that the persons of the generation at Saint-Cyr who had known and enjoyed Racine and Fénelon, and who remembered all of which they were cured, could alone realize the perfection of the education, the grace, and the language of Saint-Cyr; after them the essential virtues and the rules were kept, but the charm had flown, perhaps we may even say the life.
During these years of labour and tentative effort Mme. de Maintenon never ceased to visit, inspire, and correct Saint-Cyr; she went there once in every two days at least, remaining whole days whenever she could. She took part in the classes, in the exercises, in the smallest details of the establishment, thinking nothing beneath her. “I have often seen her,” says one of the modest historians quoted by M. Lavallée, “arrive before six in the morning in order to be present at the rising of the young ladies, and follow them throughout their whole day in the capacity of first instructress, in order to judge properly of what should be done and regulated. She helped to comb and dress the little ones. Often she gave two or three consecutive months to one class, observing the order of the day, talking to the class in general and to each member in private; reproving one, encouraging another, giving to all the means of correcting themselves. She had much grace in speaking, as in all else that she did. Her talks were lively, simple, natural, intelligent, insinuating, persuasive. I should never finish if I tried to relate all the good she did to the classes in those happy days.” Those “happy days,” that golden age, was the period of the start, the beginning, when all was not yet reduced to a code, when a certain liberty of inexperience was mingled with the early freshness of virtue.
Nevertheless, under the wise direction of the Bishop of Chartres, Mme. de Maintenon felt the necessity of giving to her enterprise less peculiarity than she had at first intended. It was decided that the “Dames institutrices,” while remaining true to the special object of their trust, should be regular nuns under solemn vows. Warned by the first irregularities and the fancies that she saw were dawning, she busied herself in making a rampart for her girls of their Constitution and rules. She understood, like all great founders, that we can draw from human nature a particular and extraordinary strength in one direction only by suppressing, or at least repressing, in all others. This final reform, this transformation of Saint-Cyr from a secular house into a regular nunnery, was completed between the years 1692 and 1694. The grave nature of Mme. de Maintenon is imprinted on every line of the little book addressed to the “Dames” and entitled “The Spirit of the Institute of the Daughters of Saint-Louis.” The first suggestion made to them is in terms as absolute as can well be imagined; nothing is ever to be changed or modified in their rule under any pretext whatsoever; solidity, stability, immovability is the vow and the command of Mme. de Maintenon—and the Institute remained faithful thereto to its last hour. The Institution was not founded, says the book, for prayer, but for action, for the education of young ladies; that is its true austerity; that is, as it were, the perpetual prayer, which needs only to be fed by other rapid and short prayers repeated often in the depths of the heart. “A mixture of prayer and action,” such was the spirit of the Institute. Mme. de Maintenon endeavours to forearm her girls against the perils they have already encountered. “Have neither fancy nor curiosity to seek for extraordinary reading and ragouts d’oraison.” “There is a great difference between knowing God through learning, by the point of the mind, by the subtlety of reason, by the multiplicity of studies, and knowing Him through the simple instructions of Christianity.” Between those lines I seem to read, “Above all, not much Racine and no more Fénelon.”
Truly, it was a high idea that the Dames de Saint-Louis were destined to bring up young ladies to be mothers of families and to take part in the good education of their children, thus placing in their hands a portion of the future of France and of religion. “There is,” says Mme. de Maintenon, “in this work of Saint-Louis, if properly done in a spirit of true faith and a real love of God, the wherewithal to renew throughout this kingdom the perfection of Christianity.”
The foundress reminds them in so many words that, being at the gates of Versailles as they are, there is no medium for them between a very strict or a very scandalous establishment. “Make your parlours inaccessible to all superfluous visits. Do not fear to seem a little stern, but do not be haughty.” She counsels a more absolute humility than she is able to obtain. “Reject the name of Dames [ladies] and take pleasure in calling yourselves the Daughters of Saint-Louis.” She particularly insists on this virtue of humility, which is always the weak side of the Institution. “You will preserve yourselves only by humility. You must expiate what there is of human grandeur in your foundation.” Recognizing these conditions of society, Mme. de Maintenon gives this advice to a young girl leaving Saint-Cyr for the world: “Never appear without the body of your gown (meaning in dishabille), and flee from all the other excesses common even to girls in the present day, such as too much eating, tobacco, hot liquors, too much wine, etc.; we have enough real needs without inventing others so useless and dangerous.”
In presence of a world that she knew so well, we must not think that Mme. de Maintenon tried to make tender plants, fragile women, ingenuously ignorant, with the morality of novices; she had, beyond all other persons, a profound sense of reality. She desired her “Dames” to speak boldly to their pupils on the marriage state; to show them the world and its divers conditions such as they are. “Most nuns,” she said, “dare not utter the word ‘marriage.’ Saint Paul had no such false delicacy, for he speaks of it very openly.” She was the first to speak of it as an honourable, necessary, and hazardous state. “When your young ladies have entered marriage they will find it is not a thing to laugh about. You should accustom them to speak of it seriously, even sadly, in a Christian manner; for it is the state in which we have most tribulations, even in the best marriage; they should be shown that three-fourths of all marriages are unhappy.” As for celibacy, to which too many young girls might be condemned on leaving the Institution, for lack of a dowry (“my greatest need,” she says jestingly, “is of sons-in-law”), she thinks it an equally sad state. In general, no one has ever had fewer illusions than Mme. de Maintenon. Speaking of men, she thinks them rough and hard, “little tender in their love when passion ceases to have sway.” As for women, she has very fixed views of them, which are but moderately flattering. “Women,” she says, “only half know things, but the little they do know makes them usually conceited, disdainful, loquacious, and scornful of solid information.” The education of Saint-Cyr, after its reform, had it always been carried out in Mme. de Maintenon’s true spirit, would not have sinned through too much timidity, weakness, and tender grace; its austerity was only veiled.
The reform once established at Saint-Cyr and the first sad impression effaced, all became orderly, and joy returned as before to a life so uniform and busy. Mme. de Maintenon had, as I have said, the gift of education, and she would have no sadness about it; there never can be sadness in what is done thoroughly with a full heart in the right way; at one moment or at another, joy, which is but the expansion of the soul, returns and cannot cease to flow through actions. Mme. de Maintenon relied greatly on recreations to form her pupils pleasantly, to show them their defects and win their confidence without seeming to be in search of it. In the good she felt she had done at Saint-Cyr she dwelt much on the pains she had bestowed on “recreation.” “That,” she said, “is what leads to union and removes partialities; that is what binds the mistresses with the pupils; a superior makes herself liked and warms the hearts of her girls by giving them pleasures; that is the time when edifying things can be said without repelling, because we can mingle them with gayety; many good maxims can be thrown out in jest.” She requires from the mistresses she has trained a talent for recreation as well as for teaching. “Make your recreations gay and free, and your girls will come to them.”