Ninon was at first amazed at this strange reception and insolent behaviour of mistress and maid. But she was not left long in perplexity, since “Mademoiselle Balbien” permitted the truth to escape her prim lips, that Madame de Maintenon had credited Ninon with the design of introducing d’Aubigné into the boudoir in the middle of that memorable interview, with the intention of disgracing Madame in the estimation of the king. That Ninon was not made of the stuff for this, it is almost superfluous to say. Any sins she might have to answer for, did not include the hypocrisy with which Madame de Maintenon had clothed herself about, and almost equally needless is it to repeat that by no possible means the concealed presence of the king could have been known by any but the two most immediately concerned. It could be but a matter of their dual consciousness.
For six years Madame Guyon remained in prison. Monsieur Fénelon’s Maximes des Saints was condemned by the Court of Rome, and the bigotry and hypocrisy ruling Versailles swelled daily.
Molière, alas! was no more, to expose the perilous absurdities and lash them to extinction; but the comedy of La Fausse Prude, produced some weeks later at the Italiens, was a prodigious success. The world greatly enjoyed and admired the fitting of the cap, built upon the framework supplied by one who had befriended and sheltered under her own roof the forlorn young orphan girl, Françoise d’Aubigné.
CHAPTER XXV
The Melancholy King—The Portents of the Storm—The Ambition of Madame Louis Quatorze—The Farrier of Provence—The Ghost in the Wood—Ninon’s Objection—The King’s Conscience—A Dreary Court—Racine’s Slip of the Tongue—The Passing of a Great Poet, and a Busy Pen Laid Down.
The disastrous thrall holding Louis XIV. to Madame de Maintenon, was an endless theme of wonder and speculation among his subjects. Very few of them ascribed it to pure unadulterated love and affection for his old wife—for she was his elder by three years—while Louis himself was now at an age when the enthusiasm of life slows into some weariness and languor as it recognises the emptiness and futility of all mundane things. There were times when he was lost in brooding thought, and he would wander about his splendid galleries and salons and magnificent gardens, absorbed, if his dull aspect expressed the inward spirit, in melancholy reflection. The glory had departed of his earlier ruling, leaving the nation loaded with debt. The price had to be paid for those brilliant victories of long ago, and accumulation of debt on the many later reverses cried for settlement. The provinces had been deeply impoverished by the absenteeism of their overlords, whose presence the Grand Monarque had for so many years required to grace Versailles, attired in their silks and velvets, sweeping their plumed, diamond-aigretted hats to the polished floors, bowing and crowding to gaze at the sublime process of His Majesty’s getting up, promenading with the great ladies among the fountains and bosquets of Trianon, spending the heaven-bestowed hours in the sweetness of doing nothing but manipulate their rapier-hangers and snuff-boxes; while Jacques Bonhomme, away down in Touraine and Perigord and Berri, and where you will in the length and breadth of fair France, was sweating and starving to keep those high-born gentlemen supplied with money in their purses for the card-tables, and to maintain their lackeys and gilded coaches in the sumptuous style which was no more than Louis required of the vast throng. It was in its way an unavoidable exaction, since the few of the nobility who remained on their own estates had done so at the peril of incurring the severe displeasure of the king, the Sun-King—Le roi le veut—whose centre was Versailles.
And still the full time was not yet when all this should be changed. Even for Louis, the absolute reckoning day was but shadowing in. “After us the deluge”: that prophetic utterance was spoken long after Louis was borne to his rest in St Dénis, but when the records of his life tell of those long-brooding, silent pacings amid the grandeur and treasures of his splendid palace, comes the question if from afar off there did not sound the murmur of the flood that was to break some hundred years hence, if in some dim yet certain way the cloud no bigger than a man’s hand was not apparent to his introspective gaze, for as yet the domestic misfortunes of his latest years had not befallen, death had not robbed him of his heir, and the rest dear to him; but discontent, not unmingled with contempt, seethed round the proud King of France. How were the mighty fallen, and how great the political mistake which indissolubly linked the ambitious woman, clothed about in her new-found meretricious garb of piety, with his great responsible destiny—Louis, Dieudonné and elect ruler.
Nor did it stop at the secret, sufficiently open and acknowledged, of his marriage with Scarron’s widow. The fear was well enough founded that she was moving earth, and if possible all heaven, to be Queen of France; but righteousness had small part in the endeavour, and trickery and chicanery failed to prevail to this crowning end upon the king’s consciousness and conviction. Pride, and the sense of his irrevocable bondage, mingled with the poison of the hypocritical devoutness instilled into him by his wife and her confessor, kept him silently deferential to this woman, spoiled by prosperity; but she herself says that all her endeavours to amuse him or bring a smile to his lips, failed. He had—mildly construing the homely proverb—put off from shore with a person—more or less mentionable—and he was bound to sail to land with her.
The diablerie at work was untiring, and had many strings, and there seem, small, if any, question that to the genius of the Marseilles merchant’s wife, formerly Madame Arnoul, the curious tale of the Farrier of Provence is due.