It was in Condé’s army of Huguenots that Constant now enlisted, apparently following arrangements made by his father. After desultory warfare of three years or so, during which both royal marriages defiantly took place, peace was finally concluded in 1616. The peace brought freedom for Constant, and a payoff of a million and a half livres for the prince de Condé. The provisions of King Henri’s Edict were reaffirmed, Protestant security assured, and the encroachments of Rome on French-style Catholicism once again repelled. But a year or so later, the bridegroom-King, now aged fifteen and already two years into his legal majority, decided to take the reins of the kingdom into his own hands. He banished his mother to her country château and incarcerated the prince de Condé with his lovely young wife in the fortress of Vincennes, where the pair consoled themselves with the procreation of a family of distinguished troublemakers. To his alarmed Huguenot subjects, the young King declared baldly, “I do not like you,” then set about undermining them financially and, spasmodically, by armed assault.
Constant transferred his allegiance to the newly ascendant Catholic extremists without a moment’s remorse—not even for his Protestant father, who was now, for the fourth time in his life, under sentence of death as a traitor. Indeed, far from appealing to his new comrades to spare the aged Agrippa, the “wretch” of a son pocketed his 8,000-livre “conversion fee” and set off to lead an armed attack on his father’s fortified redoubt of Dognon in their native region of Poitou. But the old soldier proved too tough for them; he repelled the attack, disinheriting the apostate Constant once and for all and renouncing him as “henceforth a bastard.” Constant’s place in his father’s affections was taken by Agrippa’s actual illegitimate son, Nathan, a steady young man of some seventeen years. The fortress of Dognon and the governorship of the nearby town of Maillezais, two jewels in Constant’s expected inheritance, were sold to a more reliable Protestant, and with the proceeds in his purse and Nathan at his side, Agrippa betook himself to a gentlemanly exile in Calvinist Geneva, acquiring, at the age of seventy-one, a rejuvenating new wife into the bargain. “Father, forgive them” was the coincidental lesson of the day, recited by the officiating minister, “for they know not what they do.”
The disowned Constant lived a year or so on the 8,000-livre price of his apostasy before adding a double murder to his sins. Learning that his wife, an heiress whose money he had himself frittered away, had arranged to meet a lover, he stormed into the auberge of their tryst, where he found the young man seated on the privy, and there he stabbed him, not once, but thirty times. He considerately permitted his wife to say her prayers before dispatching her, too, with a restrained six blows of the same dagger. Murder being considered a reasonable revenge for outraged seventeenth-century manhood, for these two deaths Constant paid no penalty at all. Even his father forbore to censure him for this, though he soon enough had other cause to do so.
In 1622 Constant made a second attempt to recapture his lost inheritance of Dognon; once again he failed, and this time found himself imprisoned in the Protestant “safe town” of La Rochelle, on France’s Atlantic coast. Once out, he wrested control of his father’s former town of Maillezais and shrewdly turned it over to the Catholic party at court. Their gratitude was insufficient, it seems, for by 1624 Constant was at Geneva, weeping on his father’s knees, “furiously writing prose and verse against the papacy,” and vowing to take up arms again in the Protestant cause. Agrippa, trusting more to hope than experience, gave him money; Constant departed for Paris, but was back again a few years later, in need of more.
The old man did his best to persuade his son to take to soldiering again. It was February of 1627; Protestant armies were on the march all over Europe, battling the Catholic Habsburgs for the crown of the Holy Roman Empire. The war was entering a critical phase, and France’s Huguenots were again in open revolt, this time against the repressive policies of the now twenty-six-year-old Louis and his premier ministre, Cardinal Richelieu. Agrippa felt that Constant could provide a useful extra sword for the Huguenot bastion of La Rochelle, in the family’s home region of Poitou. Instead, the son declared a preference for England, where the late King James’s favourite, the “duc de Boucquinquant” (Buckingham) was preparing an invasion fleet in support of the La Rochelle Huguenots. To England and its Protestant King Constant did go, but not before stopping in Paris to relay his own Catholic King such information as he possessed concerning France’s Huguenots and their military plans. A succession of conversions and betrayals followed, and by the end of the year Constant found himself once again in prison, this time in Bordeaux, on the order of the Catholic duc d’Épernon, governor of the region.
No one could pretend that he had not brought his misfortune upon himself, unless the blood of a born adventurer can be blamed for reappearing in a second generation. Constant had inherited enough of his father’s bold temperament to get himself repeatedly into trouble, but not enough of his strength of mind to get himself out of it. After years of pardons and second chances, Agrippa at last turned his back on “the treacherous soul and leprous body” of his only legitimate son, and abandoned him completely.
Constant was down, but not out. The ups and downs of a wayward life had detracted nothing from his habitual charm and plausibility. The prison governor at Bordeaux, Pierre de Cardilhac, was delighted to have so entertaining a prisoner under his dismal roof. He allowed Constant an unusually long leash, and even gave him leave to play the viol and the lute in one or two concerts in the town. He had, moreover, a very young and very pretty daughter, herself apparently kept on a leash of equally flexible length.
Pierre de Cardilhac was a distant cousin of the duc d’Épernon, at whose orders Constant had been imprisoned; indeed, he owed his post to this connection. Quite suddenly he received a letter from the duc, ordering him to have his daughter married “before Sunday” to the prisoner d’Aubigné. Constant had been in the prison not yet three months; he was forty-two years old, and the girl was just sixteen. The assumption must be that she was already pregnant, or at least that she had been seduced by Constant. No birth was recorded, however, and the hasty wedding ceremony itself remains the only possible evidence of it.
In the short life of Constant’s bride, Jeanne de Cardilhac, there had been much less drama than in his own, although there would be compensation, and more than enough, in the years that lay ahead of her. Her family background was modest by comparison with his, though in quality of birth they were more or less equals. Her father, formally a “gentleman landowner,” does not in fact seem to have owned any land at all, and his present position as prison governor, “lieutenant commander of the Château-Trompette,” was a minor post by the standards of the day. Though Jeanne brought no property to the marriage, she was attractive and intelligent; Constant was later fond of declaring that he had “fallen in love” with his jailer’s daughter. The marriage contract does not seem to have been graced by any exchange of money, or indeed any dowry at all, except an early freedom from prison for the bridegroom and a precocious strength of character in the bride.
The ceremony took place on December 27, 1627, with conditions attached, both positive and negative: Constant’s sentence was quashed, but Jeanne was forbidden to see any member of her family ever again—further evidence, perhaps, of an illegitimate pregnancy. Unwelcome in their native district, nonetheless the couple could not go far, being without money; Constant even had debts outstanding. To repay them, if he did repay them, he fell back on his old habit of gambling, and adopted the new habit of counterfeiting coins. From Bordeaux, the pair moved a hundred miles north, to Niort, and in 1629 Jeanne gave birth to her first son, named Constant for his father, who was by now involved in open conspiracy against the state. Though his political principles were no stronger than his religious convictions, he was keen to make money, and to that end was busy recruiting men for the mercenary army of Gaston d’Orléans, brother of King Louis XIII, and at twenty-one years of age already an experienced rebel.
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Though Marie de’ Medici, mother of Louis and Gaston, had been recalled from exile in her country château, the government of France was by now dominated by the King’s brilliant prime minister, Cardinal Richelieu. Three years before, Richelieu had arranged an advantageous marriage for Gaston—advantageous, but unwanted—and the young duc had responded by plotting to have Richelieu assassinated. The plot had failed; Gaston had saved his own skin by denouncing his accomplices, and was now up in arms once more against the Cardinal and his own brother, protesting the increasing centralization of power in France at the expense of the great local princes, including, of course, himself. Though this rebellion failed, too, sending his fellow conspirators to the scaffold, Gaston was pardoned, to carry on plotting further, equally unsuccessful campaigns. Recruiting-master Constant was arrested yet again and incarcerated in a first prison, then in a second, where in 1634 Jeanne gave birth to their son Charles, and then in a third, at Niort, where, on November 24, 1635, their daughter, Françoise, was born.
The little girl was one of the least welcome things in the world: a daughter in a poor gentry family. Even if Constant should be released, even if they could move to some other district, away from their disgrace, and find some steady way of life, perhaps even reclaim a part of their lost inheritance, Françoise would be as a millstone around their necks. Her brothers would somehow make their way—the Church, perhaps, for the introspective elder boy, the army for his outgoing brother; either one of them might be apprenticed in the law or find a place with a merchant house in one of the great cities. But the girl would be only a liability, draining the family purse for a paltry dowry to persuade some man to transfer her to his own account books. In the meantime, she would passively reflect the family’s standing, wherever they might find themselves. In an age of fervid social consciousness, the dependent daughter was the readiest weather-vane for the fortunes of the family as a whole, and every gown, or last-year’s gown, would tell the tale: the d’Aubignés still belonged, or they belonged no longer, within the blessed circle of gentlemen’s families.
To start their baby girl on her difficult journey, Jeanne and Constant took at least a first sensible step: they engaged two promising godparents, both nobles with definite links to the d’Aubigné family. The godfather, François de La Rochefoucauld, seigneur d’Estissac, was a cousin of sorts to Constant—in fact, Agrippa’s great-nephew. The nine-year-old godmother, Suzanne, was the daughter of Charles de Baudéan, a boyhood friend of Constant’s (Constant had served as a page to Charles’s father) and a distant relation, now governor of the town of Niort. Though Suzanne was to make a prestigious marriage, and her mother was to interfere determinedly, for good and ill, in the baby’s later life, the godfather would live out his days in the provinces, and his expected influence would come to nothing at all.
The baptism took place four days after the birth, in the church of Nôtre-Dame in Niort. The child’s name was a tactical choice, as her elder brother’s had been: Françoise was named for the governor’s wife, as Charles had been for the governor himself. Constant père did not attend the baptism; the prison regime at Niort being less liberal than he had known in Bordeaux, he had not been given leave. It is not certain whether his family returned to him once the ceremony was concluded. The baby was provided with a wet-nurse, as was customary, and it may be that she was taken to live with this woman, in or near Niort, for her first two years or so. In any event, by the end of 1638, soon after her third birthday, she was living with her Aunt Louise, Constant’s surviving sister.
Jeanne had departed the year before for Paris, with the two boys in tow, seeking to overturn a part of Agrippa d’Aubigné’s will. The old warrior had died in 1630 at the age of seventy-eight, and Constant’s lost inheritance had been bestowed on his two sisters. The greater part of it, Agrippa’s château of Crest near Geneva and, above all, the very fine estate of Surimeau, had been left to the elder sister, Marie, who had since died. Surimeau was in the Niort region; it had woods and meadows and a valuable mill, and contained within it the second estate, smaller but very beautiful, of la Berlandière. Long before, old Agrippa had craftily winkled Surimeau away from its legal owner, his brother-in-law, and now, in similar mode, Constant’s own brother-in-law, Josué de Caumont d’Adde, was winkling it away from him. Allowing a few begrudged parcels of its land for his son, Agrippa had bequeathed most of the property to Marie and her heirs, in default of whom it was to return to the d’Aubigné family. Marie was no more, though her two daughters were still living, but their “ugly, vulgar spendthrift” father had no intention of returning the inheritance to the family of his late wife. Neglectful of his elder daughters, he had married again and was now bending or breaking the law to ensure all rights to Surimeau, including those reserved to Constant, for the children of his second wife. And he had a certain right on his side: the estate had technically belonged to Agrippa’s first wife, not to Agrippa himself; moreover, after the last Huguenot uprising, Agrippa had been convicted of treason, so that his property in France was not legally his to dispose of. Nothing was quite clear, and in this lack of clarity Jeanne had mounted a plucky challenge to her brother-in-law Caumont d’Adde.
This required her to bring a case before the Parlement of Paris, a lengthy and expensive business with no certainty of success. It was no doubt her sister-in-law, Louise, who had agreed to finance the undertaking. On their father’s death, eight years before, Louise had been shocked to learn of Constant’s exclusion from the family fortune, and had set aside from her own inheritance the substantial sum of 11,000 livres, amounting to several years’ income, for the benefit of her brother and his family. Now she had taken in his little daughter to live with her as one of her own children.
Louise and her husband, Benjamin Le Valois, seigneur de Villette, lived at Mursay, a pretty château a mile or two from Niort, with a small farm and its own peasant-worked lands attached. The estate, made over to Louise by Agrippa twenty-five years before, had provided her husband with a way of life perfectly suited to his uncomplicated temperament. Hampered by his Protestantism in a time of Catholic favouritism for every official post, and lacking the ambition in any case to make a successful career, Benjamin in his thirties had taken readily to the life of a country gentleman. It was not high living—the land around Mursay was swampy and he was obliged to do plenty of physical work himself—but a regular income, a steady domestic life, and the consolations of his religion had made him a contented man.
Louise and Benjamin de Villette, now in their fifties, had four children of their own, two older girls and a boy and girl nearer in age to Françoise. Their elder daughters, Madeleine and Aymée, aged seventeen and fifteen in 1638, when three-year-old Françoise came to live with them, played the roles of big sister and governess to their little cousin, but it was the boy, Philippe, aged six, rather than five-year-old Marie, who became her daily companion and a fast childhood friend.
The château of Mursay, complete with moat and turrets and a fairy-tale forest, was a paradise for an active child; memories of the years she spent there were to remain a source of delight to Françoise for the rest of her life. She was treated no differently from the other children; her clothes were hand-me-downs from the three sisters, just as they had been between the sisters themselves. Her wooden shoes were her own, however, made expressly for her, deliberately too big and stuffed with straw until she should grow into them. Françoise’s daily needs were attended to by Aunt Louise herself, and from the elder girls, sitting at a table in the warm château kitchen, she learned to read and then to write, and it was fortunate that the girls knew how, since even many of the teachers in the petites écoles of the time did not. In the 1640s, writing, as distinct from reading, was still an expensive skill to acquire; parents had to provide the necessary “little lap desk, a knife, some paper, an inkwell and some powder,” and as yet it was of hardly any practical use for country boy or girl alike. But as well as writing, Françoise learned, from cousin Philippe, the eve
n rarer skill of arithmetic, “the nine arabic numbers, as well as the roman numerals, and [counting up] to a thousand,” then calculation of the cost of household purchases, the values of the different coins, and so forth. Of arithemetic, she was a keen pupil, or perhaps her cousin taught her particularly well; whatever the case, all her life she would retain a habit of regular accounting, keeping notes of incomings and outgoings, adding up expenditures even in her letters. A bright and precociously mature child, she no doubt learned a good deal as well from her Aunt Louise, whose own methodical temperament was in perfect accord with the orderly and frugal dictates of provincial gentry Protestantism.
Life at Mursay was lived in modest comfort. There was money and moral approval enough for all necessities, but not for any luxury. In a rare criticism of Mursay, Françoise was later to note that no fire was ever set in the bedrooms, a hardship for her if not for the other girls, for she felt the cold keenly: the need for a “good big fire”—“I love a big fire more than any other luxury”—is a frequent refrain in the pages of her adult correspondence. Despite their fervent Protestantism, Louise and Benjamin did nothing to turn their very young niece away from her baptismal faith, except to provide her with a daily example of kindness and generosity and quiet personal effort—in short, an example of practical goodness, without the crucifixes and holy icons so beloved of contemporary Catholicism. Françoise absorbed the lesson thoroughly, and through it learned to value the principles of Christian living above any technicality of faith or form of worship. In her adult life, through years of bitterly contested religious disputes, she would hold to this unfashionably tolerant view.
The Secret Wife of Louis XIV: Françoise d'Aubigné, Madame de Maintenon Page 2
