Mme. de Maintenon

“ The reform once established at Saint-Cyr and the first sad impression effaced, all became orderly, and joy returned as before to a life so uniform and busy. Mme. de Maintenon had, as I have said, the gift of education, and she would have no sadness about it; there never can be sadness in what is done thoroughly with a full heart in the right way; at one moment or at another, joy, which is but the expansion of the soul, returns and cannot cease to flow through actions. ”

“ Side by side with this public life, which wearied her with its shadowy power, occasionally crossed by a desire to be recognised as queen, she passed a nobler and sweeter private existence as the foundress of St Cyr. Mme de Maintenon was a born teacher; she had so won the hearts of her first pupils that they preferred her to their own mother, and was similarly successful later with the young and impetuous duchess of Burgundy, and she had always wished to establish a home for poor girls of good family placed in such straits as she herself had experienced. ”

“ Employ your mind, not in multiplying your disgusts, but in conquering them, in concealing them until they are conquered, and in making yourself like the pleasures of your condition.” Mme. de Glapion succeeded in doing so. She was the consolation of Mme. de Maintenon and her truest inheritor; together with Madame du Pérou, she maintained at Saint-Cyr that spirit of precision and regularity combined with suavity and noble manners which distinguished the foundress, until long after the latter’s death. ”

“ Mme. de Maintenon, who is the foundress of Saint-Cyr, always busy with the purpose of amusing the king, is constantly introducing some novelty among the little girls brought up in that establishment, of which it may be said that it is worthy of the grandeur of the king and of the mind of her who invented and who conducts it. But sometimes the best-invented things degenerate considerably; and that establishment which, now that we have become devout, is the abode of virtue and piety, may some day, without any profound prophesying, be that of debauchery and impiety. ”

“ There is nothing more burdensome than the life they lead; it costs them infinite trouble, constraint, expense, and ennui to pay their court; and at the end of it all you will hear them say: ‘Ah! how vexed I am; I have stood about since morning and I think the king has not even seen me.’ And, in truth,” continued Mme. de Maintenon, “they get up very early in the morning, dress with care, and are on their feet all day, watching for a favourable moment to make themselves seen and be presented ”

“ Mme. de Maintenon relied greatly on recreations to form her [Pg 230] pupils pleasantly, to show them their defects and win their confidence without seeming to be in search of it. In the good she felt she had done at Saint-Cyr she dwelt much on the pains she had bestowed on “recreation.” “That,” she said, “is what leads to union and removes partialities; that is what binds the mistresses with the pupils; a superior makes herself liked and warms the hearts of her girls by giving them pleasures ”

“ Mme. d’Auxy [this was Jeannette de Pincré, an adopted daughter of Mme. de Maintenon] is quite beside herself when she has a new gown. She consults me about the trimming; I enter into it and give her my advice, telling [Pg 265] her that her joy and liking for adornment belongs to her age, but that youth must pass, and that I hope she will come sooner or later to better inclinations. I think that such compliance does more good than severity, which serves only to rebuff the young and make them dissimulating. ”

“ Thereupon she asked Mlle. de Saint-Maixant what she considered most contrary to charity, to ridicule a person for corporal defects, or for defects of mind or temper. The young lady answered, “To ridicule defects of mind or heart.” “It is never right to ridicule any defects,” said Mme. de Maintenon; “charity enjoins us to excuse all; but I think that it is base and cruel to blame a person for a natural defect which he has had no share in producing, and which he cannot correct. [Pg 292] Good hearts and minds are incapable of laughing at such defects ”

“ She disliked her for little things and disliked her for great ones. She supposed that it was Mme. de Maintenon who, in concert with Père de La Chaise, had plotted and carried through the persecution of the Reformers; in this she was not only human, but she found herself once more a little of a Calvinist or a Lutheran with a touch of the old leaven; she thought close at hand what the refugees in Holland were writing from afar. She believed she saw in Mme. ”

“ But the perils that surround my son’s existence make me spend many a sleepless night, and certainly his regency has not been to me a subject of satisfaction.
Paris, 1718.
The affair of the Duc du Maine is not one of those things that can be forgotten, at least not so long as those two old hussies are living [Mme. de Maintenon and the Princesse des Ursins] ; for they stir him up, together with his little devil of a wife, to all sorts of secret plotting against my son. Mme. des Ursins has one good thing about her, however: she does not call upon the good God to assist her intrigues. ”

“ If “Esther,” with the worldly consequences and the introduction of the élite of profane society that then ensued, proved a distraction and perhaps an imprudence and fault in Mme. de Maintenon’s management of the first Saint-Cyr, we feel that we ought not to cavil, and no one in the world can really blame her. “Esther” has remained, in the eyes of all, the crown of that establishment. The details of the composition of that adorable play and its representation are too well known to need repetition ”

“ On this subject she drops into whatever the grossest popular credulity could imagine in its days of madness; she sees in Mme. de Maintenon, even after the death of Louis XIV. and while buried at Saint-Cyr, a monopolist of wheat, a poisoner expert in the art of a Brinvilliers, a Gorgon, an incendiary who sets fire to the château de Lunéville. And after she has exhausted everything, she adds: “All the evil that has been said of this diabolical woman is still below the truth.” She applies to her an old German proverb: “Where the devil can’t go himself he sends an old woman.” ”

“ 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.” ”

“ Speaking of men, she thinks them rough and hard, “little tender in their love when passion ceases to have sway.” As for women, she has very fixed views of them, which are but moderately flattering. “Women,” she says, “only half know things, but the little they do know makes them usually conceited, disdainful, loquacious, and scornful of solid information.” The education of Saint-Cyr, after its reform, had it always been carried out in Mme. de Maintenon’s true spirit, would not have sinned through too much timidity, weakness, and tender grace ”

“ 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 ”

“ She particularly insists on this virtue of humility, which is always the weak side of the Institution. “You will preserve yourselves only by humility. You must expiate what there is of human grandeur in your foundation.” Recognizing these conditions of society, Mme. de Maintenon gives this advice to a young girl leaving Saint-Cyr for the world: “Never appear without the body of your gown (meaning in dishabille) , and flee from all the other excesses common even to girls in the present day, such as too much eating, tobacco, hot liquors, too much wine, etc. ”

“ This ignorance was, perhaps, aggravated by the fact of his realising the need of a knowledge of Latin in order to read diplomatic despatches, while he could see no use whatever in knowing the facts of religion.
He never changed in this respect; Mme. de Maintenon herself made vain efforts. The second Madame, La Palatine, did not succeed better. She wrote: "If he only believed that he should listen to his confessor and recite his Pater Noster, all would go well and his devotion would be perfect." ”

“ Thus it is that we succeed when the desire of excelling [shining] makes us act. A simple, Christian education would have made good girls, out of whom we could have made good wives and good nuns; we have made beaux-esprits, whom we ourselves who made them cannot endure: there is our blame, in which I have a greater share than any one.
Let us come to the remedy; for we must not be discouraged. I have already proposed some to Balbien [Mme. de Maintenon’s waiting-maid mentioned in “Saint-Simon” as Nanon] . ”

“ The Duchesse du Lude has come to me; which delights [Pg 194] me, and it is true that Mme. de Maintenon sees me as often as she can. I think I can assure you that those two ladies love me. Never doubt, my dear grandmamma, that I love you as much as I should.
Versaile ce 25 Mars. 1698
Iespere que iescrire assez bien, ma chere grandmaman jai un maitre qui se donne beaucoup de paine iaurois grans tort de ne pas profitter des soins qu’on prend de tout ce que me regarde la D du Lude estre venue auprais de moy dont je suis ravie et il est vrai que Mme. ”

“ The impossibility of entering into the details of so many lives in a single volume is clearly apparent. Only the most salient points can be considered. Many who would amply repay a careful study have simply been glanced at, and others have been omitted altogether. As it would be out of the question in a few pages to make an adequate portrait of women who occupy so conspicuous a place in history as Mme. De Maintenon and Mme. ”

“ But precautions were needed in this first attempt of Mme. de Maintenon to mingle substantial qualities, reason, and charm, which she found it [Pg 222] impossible to maintain; to do so all the mistresses and all the pupils needed a wisdom and strength equal to her own. To bring up young ladies in a “Christian, reasonable, and noble manner” was her object; but a danger soon appeared that nobleness would lead to contempt of humility, and reasonableness to a spirit of reasoning.
It was during these tentative years, while Saint-Cyr was trying its wings and working out its apprenticeship, that Mme. ”

“ In these days we live apart; my son takes his meals alone; I the same; his wife the same; she is so lazy she is never able to resolve at a given moment to do the slightest thing; she lies on a sofa all day, and Mme. de Berry follows that example at the Luxembourg; so you see, my dear Louise, that there cannot be any Court. Ah! you do not know the French; as long as they hope to obtain what they want they are charming; but out of fifty aspirants, forty-nine enemies are made, who cabal and play the devil. I know the Court and State too well to rejoice for a moment that my son is regent. ”

“ This remark does not apply to the Saint-Cyr letters; in those she is genuine, she is writing on a topic that fills her heart and opens it to others. Saint-Cyr was an episode in Mme. de Maintenon’s life, and as such it can be placed here with some completeness. The last chapter of this volume contains a few miscellaneous letters bearing more especially upon the character and career of the Duchesse de Bourgogne, which Sainte-Beuve asserts can only be truly known through the letters of Mme. ”

“ It is pure indolence in her. That is why we cannot take our meals together. She has not spoken to me since the death of the king.
Mme. de Berry is red. When she wishes to please she ought to talk, for she has natural eloquence. She keeps around her those who constantly deceive her. I say nothing to her now; she has intelligence, but has been very ill brought up. I no longer consider her as one of my grandchildren; she goes her way, and I go mine; I do not concern myself with her, nor she with me.
[Pg 81]
Paris, 1716. ”

“ We are now at Meudon, a magnificent palace. Well! every one must go to walk, without liking to do so, in a dreadful wind perhaps, out of respect to the king. They come back very tired, and you will see a number of women complaining and saying: ‘How weary I am! this place will kill us all.’ ‘I cannot bear it,’ says another; ‘if I could only walk with some one whom I like, but no! I find myself in file with some one who makes me die of weariness.’ For no one can choose her companion any more than you can here; she must go with whoever presents himself. The fact is,” said Mme. ”

“ The chevalier, who for some time past has been the grand-prior of France in the Order of Malta, is the son of Mlle. de Séry, formerly my maid-of-honour; she now calls herself Mme. d’Argenton. The mother of the abbé is an opera-dancer named Florence. My son has also a daughter by the left hand, whom he does not recognize; he has married her to a Marquis de Ségur; her mother was Desmares, one of the best actresses in the king’s troupe. I love the Abbé de Saint-Albin, and he deserves it. In the first place, he loves me sincerely, and in the next he conducts himself extremely well. ”