Ninon de l'Enclos and her century

by Mary C. Rowsell

“Very well; the ghost in the forest bade me remind you of that visit, if you expressed any doubt of my good faith; and,” added the man, as the king said it was very strange, “before disappearing, the tall white woman uttered these words—‘He must obey me now, as he then obeyed his mother.’”

The king, in an access of dismay and perplexity, sent for the Duc de Duras, and related to him in confidence what had passed during the interview with the peasant. The duke, who was an intimate friend of Ninon, told her the wondrous tale.

It took no time for her to arrive at the conclusion that Madame Louis Quatorze and her faithful card-divining friend and fortune-teller, Madame Arnoul, were at the bottom of the business, and under promise on the duke’s part of inviolable secrecy, she told him of the adventure in the Vosges and the very conspicuous part she had played in it, actuated by her enmity towards de Montespan. The farrier, she did not doubt, was honest enough; but, simple and credulous, he had been made the tool of the two women—an easy prey to Madame Arnoul, who, living at Marseilles, had seen him, and reckoned him up as suitable for her design.

The duke was of opinion that there was no doubt Ninon’s solution of the mystery was correct, and he added that, this being the case, it was her duty to inform the king of it—“For who knows,” said Duras, “that he may not be weak enough to obey the ghost’s behests, and disgrace himself and his throne in the eye of all Europe and the universe, by seating the Maintenon upon it.” It was a most serious matter—most serious.

Ninon, however, shrank from the suggestion. She was a woman of courage; but recent experience had taught her the lengths of malice to which her old friend Françoise could go, and she had no mind to measure weapons with her again. To make clean confession of the affair to the king, was simply to bring down upon herself all the thunderbolts of the hatred of the woman whose ingenuity was never at fault in plausibility, and the finding the way to retain the kings good graces at no matter what cost to anyone.

Ninon saw a far better plan than sacrificing herself for the destruction of the scheme. She begged the duke not to compromise her to the king; but to represent to him the advisability of sending competent and trusted persons to the Ribeauvillé château, accompanied by the duke himself, and there to sound and search the recesses and panelling of the haunted room and the adjacent one she indicated, and little more would be necessary to prove to His Majesty that he had been duped.

The journey taken, and the search made, the emissaries duly returned. Their report fully satisfied the king that he had been victimised, by some person or persons unknown, in the gloomy old mansion—and his marriage with Madame de Maintenon was not then or ever publicly and officially proclaimed. If he had any suspicions of her complicity, he made no sign of them; either he thought her incapable of using such base means of attaining the desired end, or, on the other hand, he was indulgent to the not unnatural desire to see published the fact of the honour he had bestowed on her. At all events, calm and serene, outwardly dignified, unruffled, Madame Louis Quatorze dwelt on at Versailles, in the odour of all the sanctimoniousness and decorum the coming of herself and of Père la Chaise had imparted to the vast place.

Well endowed personally and mentally, and amiably disposed, Louis was admirably fitted by nature to represent the beloved and worshipped king who had maintained the spiritual liberties of his Protestant subjects, when he himself became a Catholic—since, as he had said, “Paris vaut une Messe.” But though his naturally grand deportment and the conviction of his own semi-divinity and sense of great-doing had wrought Louis to brilliant achievements for the State, apart from the glories of the battlefield, it is more than conceivable that he was fully conscious of his own inadequate education and rearing, to which Mazarin’s policy had limited him. Beneath all the magnificent assumption, the common sense and inner consciousness of Louis were not likely to fail, as time passed, to show him that he was but a cipher in the scheme of the universe, an atom; and under the theological direction of his Jesuit confessor, an exaggerated estimate of his own sinfulness and imperfections crushed him into melancholy and self-surrender, till he actually and honestly imagined that eternal punishment threatened, unless he humbled himself, as he did to the dust, to follow the instruction of his Jesuit confessor. Yet Madame de Maintenon herself laments that “she could never make him understand that humility was a Christian virtue.” À qui la faute? His most intimate exemplar of the attribute was one more outwardly shining than profound. There have been apologists for Madame de Maintenon, and for Père la Chaise, and for these promoters of the Nantes Revocation they do not seem to be superfluous, these “Pièces Justificatives,” of the gouvernante of the Montespan’s children, and later of their father. The Duc de St Simon, among many other writers, makes less than no extenuation; while, on the other hand, he describes Père la Chaise as a strong Jesuit, yet withal neither fanatical nor fawning—and yet more powerfully still in his favour, he says that although he advised the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, he was no party to the merciless persecution by which it was followed.

Forgetting, or rather ignoring, his own youth, Louis imposed rigorous discipline upon all about him. The merest peccadillo incurred possibilities of imprisonment, and only absolute impeccability being tolerated, pharisaism and hypocrisy were rampant. The royal children and grandchildren were required, on pain of utter disgrace, to make weekly confession, and no choice of a spiritual director was permitted the Grand Dauphin. To Père la Chaise, and to him alone, was committed the conscience of the Jansenist Fénelon’s pupil; and at the great annual festivals of the Church, all the members of the royal family were required to communicate publicly. The Duchess of Burgundy was sorely rebuked for a breach of this regulation.

The consideration and deference often only meagrely accorded to Queen Maria Théresa, was never lacking to Louis’s morganatic wife. One day, at the camp of Compiègne, on the occasion of a mock siege, the king stood hat in hand, for more than an hour beside her carriage door, explaining to her the manœuvres of the troops. Any reference not entirely and absolutely complimentary to Madame Louis Quatorze, or to anything connected with her past life, would rouse him to violent anger. It would have seemed that the two went in mortal fear of each other.