Louis XIV. at Saint-Cyr appears full of charm, of nobleness always, and sometimes with a certain bonhomie which he showed nowhere else. Under great events he intervened as king; when it was judged proper to reform the Constitution, he re-read it and approved it with his signature; when it becomes necessary to dismiss the recalcitrant mistresses, such as Mme. de La Maisonfort and some others, and to use for the purpose lettres de cachet, he, knowing that the heart of the other mistresses is wrung by this exile of their sisters, writes from the Camp at Compiègne to explain his rigour, and goes himself with a full cortège to the hall of the Community, where he holds a sort of lit de justice both regal and paternal. On his return from hunting he frequently came to find Mme. de Maintenon in this place of retreat, but never without taking time to put on, as he said, “out of respect to these ladies, a decent coat.” During the wars he remembers that he has at Saint-Cyr, in those young daughters of Saint-Louis and of the race of heroes, “warrior spirits, religious souls, good Frenchwomen;” and he asks for their prayers on days of disaster as on those of victory. He knows that they mourn with him, and that his glory is their joy. All this new and private side of Louis XIV. is very delicately and generously touched by M. Lavallée; at certain passages we are surprised to find ourselves as much touched as the great monarch himself.
Louis XIV. and Mme. de Maintenon believed in the efficacy of prayer, especially that of Saint-Cyr. “Make yourselves saints,” says the foundress to her daughters repeatedly throughout the long series of calamitous wars,—“make yourselves saints in order to gain us peace.” And towards the end, when a ray of victory returned, she mingles a sort of gayety with the solemnity of her hope. “It would be shameful in our Superior,” she writes, “if she could not raise the siege of Landrecies by force of prayers: it is for great souls to do great things.”
During the last years of Louis XIV. Mme. de Maintenon was happy only when she could go to Saint-Cyr, “to hide and comfort herself.” She said it again and again, under all forms and in all tones: “My great consoler is Saint-Cyr.”—“Vive Saint-Cyr! in spite of its defects one is better here than elsewhere in all the world.” She had tasted of all and was surfeited of all. In spite of her dazzling position, and at the very summit, apparently, she was one of those delicate natures that are more sensitive to the secret animosities of the world than to its grosser offerings. Surrounded at Versailles by men who did not like her and by women she despised, reading their hearts through their self-interested homage and cringing baseness, worn-out with fatigue and constraint in presence of the king and the royal family, who used and abused her, she went to Saint-Cyr to relax, to moan, to let fall the mask that she wore perpetually. There she was respected, cherished, and obeyed; when absent, her letters read at recreation were the pride of the one who had received them and the joy of all; when present, the mistresses and pupils concerted together to awaken her souvenirs and induce her to tell of her beginnings and the singular incidents of her fortune,—in short, to make her talk of herself; that topic to all of us so restful and so sweet. “We love to talk of ourselves,” she remarked, “were it even to say harm.” But she never said harm.
If it is painful, as she said in after years, to last too long, to live in a society of persons who do not know us or the life that we have led in former days, who are, in short, of another epoch, it is nevertheless very pleasant to retreat to a garden bench and find ourselves surrounded by fresh young souls, docile in letting themselves be trained, and eager for all that we will say to them. Do not let us analyze too closely the various sentiments of Mme. de Maintenon at Saint-Cyr; suffice it to say that the effect on all who surrounded her was fruitful and good.
The language of Saint-Cyr has a tone apart amid that period of Louis XIV.; Mme. de Caylus was the mundane flower of it. We feel that “Esther” has passed that way, and Fénelon equally. The diction is that of Racine in prose, of Massillon, shorter and more sober,—a school, in fact, all pure, precise, and perfect (to which belonged the Duc du Maine); a charming source, more sparkling on the side of the women, though rather less fertile. At first it promised greater things; and to one of the Dames de Saint-Louis (Mme. de Chapigny) Mme. de Maintenon was able to write: “I have never read anything so good, so charming, so clear, so well arranged, so eloquent, so regulated, in a word, so wonderful as your letter.”
At the death of Louis XIV. and under the harsh contrast with times so changed, Saint-Cyr passed, almost in an instant, to a state of antiquity and royal relic. After Mme. de Maintenon’s death worthy inheritors of her rule continued to maintain for a long time the culture of suavity and intelligence; but the Dames de Saint-Louis were faithful, above all, to the intention of their foundress in never making themselves talked of. Respected by all, little liked by Louis XV., who thought them, as was natural, too lofty and too worthy of honour, they vanish from sight in the continuance of duty and the uniformity of their quiet existence. A letter of Horace Walpole, who visits them as an antiquary, another from the Chevalier de Boufflers, are the only noticeable testimony that we have about them in the course of many years. When the revolution of ’89 broke out, the astonishment in that valley so close to Versailles was great, much greater than elsewhere. Saint-Cyr had made itself so completely immobile in its past that it fell abruptly from Mme. de Maintenon to Mirabeau.
From that time, after the abolition of the titles of nobility, there seemed no uncertainty except as to the precise day on which the Institution should perish. Nevertheless, the Dames de Saint-Louis made a long and placid resistance, which maintained them in their House till 1793; they accomplished and verified to the letter Mme. de Maintenon’s unconscious prediction when she said: “Your institution can never fail so long as there is a king in France.” It perished on the morrow of the day when there was no king.
But see and wonder at the linking of fates: Among the young ladies who were being educated at Saint-Cyr at that date was Marie-Anne de Buonaparte, born at Ajaccio, January 3, 1771, and received at the Institution in June, 1784. Her brother Napoléon de Buonaparte, an officer of artillery, observing that after August 10 the decrees of the Legislative Assembly seemed to announce, or rather to confirm, the ruin of the house, went to that house on the morning of September 1, 1792, and took such active steps towards the mayor of the village and the administrators of Versailles that he was enabled on the same day to take away his sister (of whom he was the guardian) and carry her to his family in Corsica. He was destined not to return to Saint-Cyr, converted by him into a French Prytaneum, until June 28, 1805, when as Emperor and master of all France he gazed—an equal to an equal—on Louis XIV.
In 1793 the devastated Saint-Cyr lost for a time its very name, and the ruined village was called Val-Libre. In 1794, while persons were converting the church into a hospital, the tomb of Mme. de Maintenon was discovered in the choir, broken open, the coffin violated, and her remains insulted. On that day, at least, she was treated as a queen.