[Footnote 193: 4th and 16th October, 1856.]
When James II., in December, 1688, fled from his kingdom, the sympathies of more than half the French people were enlisted on his side. Ignorant of the British constitution, they knew little of the peril it had incurred through the king's extraordinary extension of the dispensing power, and they saw in the landing and success of the Prince of Orange nothing but a horrible domestic tragedy, in which, through personal ambition and hatred of the true religion, a Catholic sovereign was hurled from his throne by an unnatural daughter and son-in-law. They joined, therefore, without any misgiving, in the cordial reception given to the royal fugitives by Louis, and desired nothing so much as to make common cause with them, and take vengeance on their foes. Madame de Maintenon was not among those who pressed with all ceremony into the presence of the exiled king and queen; but she visited them in private, and was received as became her station. The compassion she felt for their fate, her respectful address and Christian consolations, so won upon Mary Beatrice, that a lasting friendship was formed between the queen in name, not in reality, and the queen in reality, not in name. It continued without interruption during five-and-twenty years, and was cemented by unity of sentiments and mutual services. The ex-queen had married in her fifteenth year, and had overcome, by the advice of her mother and the Pope, her desire to devote herself to a religious life. [Footnote 194] Whatever may have been her trials in a convent, they could hardly have equalled those which befel her as queen. A hundred and forty-five of her letters to Madame de Maintenon are extant, and the readers of Miss Strickland's "Lives" are familiar with the Chaillot correspondence, in which the desolate and sorrowful queen pours forth the fulness of her sensitive heart, and never tires of expressing her love and esteem for that remarkable friend whom Providence has led across her thorny path. Often Madame de Maintenon repaired to Saint-Germain to visit her, and still more frequently the latter came to Versailles to see Madame de Maintenon. It was some relief to escape for a time from that downcast, dreary court in exile, where a crowd of poor but faithful followers gathered around a master equally wrong-headed and unfortunate. The semblance of royalty which was there kept up only increased the sadness of the place, and fostered those jealousies, intrigues, and cabals of which a banished court is so often the parent and victim.
[Footnote 194: "Duc de Noailles," tome iv., p. 231.]
A powerful coalition, in the creation of which the Prince of Orange was the chief agent, had long been menacing France, and was now actually formed. Louis found himself opposed to the greater part of Europe, for the Emperor Leopold, the Germanic and Batavian federations, the kings of Spain and Sweden, and the Pope himself, obliged to act on the defensive, adhered to the league of Augsburg. [Footnote 195]
[Footnote 195: "Duc de Noailles," p. 253.]
Three powerful armies were sent by the king of France to the seat of war. The mission of one of them was to capture Philipsburg; and from the camp before that stronghold the king's brother wrote many letters to Madame de Maintenon, describing the operations in progress. The Duc du Maine also, once her pupil, and now in his eighteenth year, wrote to her from time to time, and received thankfully the advice she offered him with all a mother's solicitude. The second of the three armies was charged with the devastation of the Palatinate, and fulfilled the part assigned it with distressing precision. If its soil was not to supply the French, it must [{821}] furnish nought to the Germans. It was a perfect garden, and Duras received orders to reduce it to a wilderness. Half a million of human beings were warned that in three days their houses would be burned and their fields laid waste. Fiercely the flames went up from city and hamlet, and the fugitives sank with fatigue and hunger in the snow, or, escaping beyond the borders, filled the towns of Europe with squalid beggary. Every orchard was hewn down, every vine and almond tree was destroyed. The castle of the Elector Palatine was a heap of ruins; the stones of Manheim were hurled into the Rhine. The cathedral of Spires and the marble sepulchres of eight Caesars were no more; and the fair city of Trèves was doomed to the same cruel fate. It was time for the voice of mercy to speak. Marshal Duras had already written to Louvois, [Footnote 196] to remonstrate against the barbarous orders he was compelled to execute, and Madame de Maintenon herself is said to have interceded with Louis for the suffering people of the Rhine. The Duc de Noailles, indeed, does not state this, like Macaulay, [Footnote 197] as matter of history, though he allows that it is probably true; and this variety in the views of the two historians, each anxious to do justice in this particular to the king's wife, proves how difficult it is for even the most sagacious and unprejudiced writers to arrive at the exact truth in reference to bygone days. Macaulay is certainly inclined to attribute to Madame de Maintenon a much larger measure of political power than she really exercised; and it is curious to observe the chain of pure assumptions by which, having taken it for granted that she "governed" Louis, he arrives at the conclusion that she induced him to recognize the Pretender as James III. [Footnote 198] In a letter written [Footnote 199] soon after the taking of Philipsburg, she seems to disclaim all active interference in state affairs. In speaking of Louvois, she says that she never contradicted him, and adds, "People think that I govern the kingdom, and they do not know that I am convinced God has bestowed on me so many favors only that I may seek more earnestly the king's salvation. I pray God daily to enlighten and sanctify, him." But it is evident how completely an earnest recommendation to Louis to spare Trèves, and stay the ravages in the Palatinate, may have tallied with that unique and hallowed purpose. Have not those from whom such truculent orders emanate a terrible account to render? Has not she who dissuades a ruler from an iniquitous measure done something toward saving his soul?
[Footnote 196: 21st May, 1689.]
[Footnote 197: Hist., chap, xi., 1689.]
[Footnote 198: Hist, chap, xxv, 1701.]
[Footnote 199: 4th October, 1688.]
There are stories afloat respecting Madame de Maintenon, and in everybody's mouth, which the Duc de Noailles scarcely condescends to notice. That she who always spoke and wrote of Louis in terms of affectionate homage should have seriously committed herself to such assertions, as that her daily task ever since her marriage was to amuse a king who could not be amused, and that he was so selfish that he never loved anything but himself, is an improbability as inconsistent with her character and policy as it is at variance with the facts of the case. That in his latter years her life was embittered by his fretful and querulous temper, and by the fits of passion into which he often fell, and that in one of her letters written at that period she complains of the difficulty of amusing him, is undoubtedly true; but this and similar complaints ought not to be stretched beyond their natural meaning, and made to tell too severely against the king. When, in the early part of 1691, Louis appeared in the camp before Mons, his wife, separated from him for the first time since their marriage, retired to Saint-Cyr, alarmed at the dangers he was about to incur, and unable to conceal her sadness. Consolatory letters poured in upon her from all quarters, especially [{822}] from her spiritual friends and advisers—the Abbé Gobelin, the Bishop of Chartres, and Fénelon. But, "the selfish monarch who could not be amused," did he, amid the bustle of a siege, find time to write to a lady fifty-five years old, whose only business had been to amuse him or fail in the attempt? He did; and that not once now and then; not briefly and drily, as a matter of form; not like a man who had little to say, and still less attachment, to the person to whom he said it. No; every day in her solitude Madame de Maintenon was consoled by seeing a royal dragoon ride into the court-yard with a letter for her from his majesty, and almost every day with one from the king's brother also. Nor was this all; the king, "who had never loved any one but himself," proved that there was at least one exception to this rule, and that he loved his wife. In 1692 she joined him at Mons, by his command, in company with other ladies of the court, and followed him to the siege of Namur. Amusements were not wanting in the royal camp. The king and his courtiers dined to the music of timbrels, trumpets, and hautboys, and he reviewed his troops in the presence of carriages full of fair faces. But, with all this, he visited the different quarters so diligently, and inspected so closely the works and trenches, riding continually within range of the enemy's guns, that his wife had almost as much anxiety for his safety as when she pondered at a distance the cruel chances of war.
In spite of his many faults, there was much in Louis XIV. to captivate the imagination of one like Madame de Maintenon. "No prince," says the Duke of Berwick, [Footnote 200] "was ever so little known as this monarch. He has been represented as a man not only cruel and false, but difficult of access. I have frequently had the honor of audiences from him, and have been very familiarly admitted to his presence; and I can affirm that his pride is only in appearance. He was born with an air of majesty, which struck every one so much, that nobody could approach him without being seized with awe and respect; but as soon as you spoke to him, he softened his countenance, and put you quite at ease. He was the most polite man in his kingdom; and his answers were accompanied by so many obliging expressions, that, if he granted your request, the obligation was doubled by the manner of conferring it; and if he refused, you could not complain."
[Footnote 200: Memoirs, vol. ii.]