Convinced as Ninon was, that the poor woman was demented, or attempting to impose on her, she sent to the Street of the Dry Tree, where Guy Patin lived; but the doctor was absent in Prussia, sharing the exile of his son, who had been condemned for being in possession of six copies of one of the libellous pamphlets that made life hideous for the king and Madame Louis Quatorze, and no other testimony, for or against, was to be found. The magistrate to whom the unhappy creature had applied to verify her identity, hastened a little later to assure Ninon that to communicate with Guy Patin would be troubling him to no purpose; since the Marion Delorme, as she called herself, had given unmistakable proof of madness, and she had been placed in the Hôtel Dieu. So the matter ended.
The shafts, impotent as they were, of Madame Deshoulières had an evil effect on Racine. Ninon, warmly seconded by St Evrémond especially, endeavoured to win the great tragic poet from his exclusive associations with the Court; but he turned a deaf ear to every argument. It is possible that the atmosphere of Versailles, as it prevailed under the ordering of Madame de Maintenon, tainted and unhealthy as it was with pharisaical “piety,” assorted with the sentiments of gloom ill-health had fostered, for Racine suffered cruelly, long before his death, from an abscess on the liver. Moreover, by education and rearing he was a Port Royalist, and the tenets of Jansenism could but have run in his blood. In her earlier time Madame de Maintenon had looked favourably on these Calvinistic sectaries of the Catholic Church; only at a later date it was that the rupture occurred with the Abbé Fénelon and Madame Guyon, the notable advocate of the doctrines of the Quietest, Michael Molinos the Spanish monk. Madame Guyon, whose maiden name was de la Motte, evinced mystic tendencies even as a child. As she grew up, it was her wish to enter a convent; but her parents prevented this, and she was married at sixteen. At eight-and-twenty she became a widow, and then the old mystic sentiments began to rule her more dominantly than ever. This was further fostered in her by her confessor and other ecclesiastics about her, who persuaded her that she was destined by Heaven to be a powerful agent for the advancement of religion.
“Still young,” says Voltaire, “with beauty, riches, and a mind fitted for society, she became infatuated with what is called spiritualism. Her confessor whose name was Lacombe, a man of a nature at once passionate and devout, and who died mad, plunged the mind of his penitent deeper into the mystic reveries by which it was already affected. Her doctrine,” Voltaire goes on to say, “was a complete renunciation of self, the silence of the soul, the annihilation of all its faculties, internal worship, and the pure and disinterested love of God, which is neither degraded by fear nor animated by the hope of reward.”
There were times, however, that religious enthusiasm, following its customary tendency, betrayed her into extravagance, and absurdities of speech in her efforts to explain her views.
By her written treatises, and by her orations, Madame Guyon made many proselytes. For five years she travelled from place to place in Piedmont and Dauphiné; then returning to Paris, she continued her labours for two years, uninterfered with. Suddenly the Archbishop of Paris, one of the most infamously profligate of priests on record, Harlay de Champvallon, found himself horrified at discovering that Madame Guyon’s teaching was neither more nor less than that of Molinos, whose Jansenist theories of grace and free-will were in direct opposition to the Jesuitical tenets, then, of course, all-dominant at Versailles. He pretended to hold Father Lacombe as a seducer, and sent him to the Bastille; while Madame Guyon was put under arrest into the convent of the Visitandines, where she won universal love, and many believers in her mild faith. From here Madame de Maintenon, who had made her acquaintance at Ninon’s house, and bore her considerable affection and esteem, freed her, and gave her a home in St Cyr. There she was introduced to Fénelon, and they formed their firm and life-long friendship.
Madame de Maintenon, however, instigated by the bigoted Bishop of Chartres, who was director of the consciences of the young ladies of St Cyr and their teachers, ere long withdrew her favour, falling in also with the prejudices the king had against her. Among other persecutions to which she was now subjected, was the production of a letter from Lacombe, or purporting to be from him, exhorting her to repent of her criminal intimacy with him. The unhappy man, always of a highly nervous, excitable nature, had now long been insane, and the accusation was believed by no one. Later, she was again imprisoned at Vincennes, and in the Bastille, whence she was delivered by de Noailles, the successor of the infamous Harlay. But here her sufferings did not end. Once more she was imprisoned in the Bastille, and finally she was exiled to Blois, where she spent the last fifteen years of her life, in acts of charity and piety, graced ever by unswerving patience; but while occasionally betrayed into extravagance of expression on religious points, her common sense and excellent judgment in everyday matters were remarkable.
CHAPTER XXIII
A Grave Question—The Troublesome Brother-in-Law—“No Vocation”—The Duke’s Choice—Peace for la Grande Mademoiselle—An Invitation to Versailles—Behind the Arras—Between the Alternatives—D’Aubigné’s Shadow—A Broken Friendship.