On Sundays, while the de Villette family attended the service at Niort’s Huguenot temple, Françoise was deposited in the prison with her father. It is a moot point whether these visits were of benefit to either of them in the development of filial or parental love. Françoise’s own memories have her often left standing in a corner of the cell, in silence, while Constant played cards with the jailors, now and then interrupting the game only to berate the little girl for her mother’s continued absence and his own poverty. She did sometimes play with the daughter of one of the jailors, the gloating little owner of a miniature tea service, which the prisoner’s daughter could not match with a single toy of her own. Françoise, however, at five or six years old, was able to make a spirited response to this undeniable inequality of worldly goods: “I’m a lady, though,” she would remind the little girl. “You’re not.” Constant apparently did now and then have a tender word for his daughter; at least he supposedly said of her, once, that “this innocent little thing is my only consolation.” But a letter of Françoise’s adult life, written to her Uncle Benjamin, tells a more likely story: “You were my father, really, when I was a child,” she wrote. “I owe more to you than to any man in the world.”
If she had found a father in her uncle, Françoise was equally fortunate in finding a mother in her kindly aunt. Jeanne herself was still in Paris, where she had begun very boldly by seeking to have her husband set at liberty. To this end, she had managed to secure an audience with Cardinal Richelieu himself via a Dr. Citois, a native of her own Poitou region and now personal physician to the Cardinal. Son éminence rouge had refused to release Constant, remarking that Madame d’Aubigné would be much happier with her husband in prison than if he were to be set free, but he had agreed to speak to the King about having him transferred to a prison in Paris, so that the family might at least be reunited. They had painted “a very black picture” of Constant at court, added Citois; Jeanne should give up hope of any further favours.
So the battle had begun, and it was to last five years, with writ followed by suit and suit followed by countersuit. Jeanne sought, and gained, a formal financial separation from Constant; her claims might be better pursued, it seemed, if she were legally his creditor rather than his dependent, and she spent her last good sum on buying up his debts. She became a regular supplicant at the Paris law courts, striding over, then trudging over, and finally shuffling over, worn and discouraged, to the grand palais de justice from her nearby lodgings in the rough-and-tumble courtyard area of the Sainte-Chapelle. Plan after plan came to nothing: brother-in-law Caumont d’Adde had proved as determined as he was unscrupulous, and he was more than a match for Jeanne, struggling more or less alone in Paris. In the spring of 1642 he gained a vicious reinforcement in the person of his son-in-law, who arrived in Paris to prod things along, “painting some good colourful portraits” of Jeanne, as he himself admitted, to discredit her in the courts. Several times he turned up at her lodgings, threatening to have her children declared bastards and herself a criminal and a whore if she refused to withdraw her case. “Since then, she’s been ill,” he reported with satisfaction. “But she’s agreed to write to her husband about it, and she will. She’ll do anything to escape my tyranny…I’m very pleased to see that Monsieur and Madame de Villette appear to be sound asleep…”
It was not so. Louise and Benjamin continued to support Jeanne—“The smallest gift to those in need is much more valued than the greatest gift to those living in plenty,” she wrote gratefully to them. But in the lawsuits themselves, they seem to have had no hand, and in fact had been advising her for almost a year already to abandon them. Carrying on, they felt, would help her “more morally than legally.” Benjamin visited Jeanne in Paris at least twice, travelling by coach or on horseback the three hundred miles of rough road from Niort, and from time to time she also saw the baronne de Neuillant, wife of Constant’s friend Charles de Baudéan and mother of Françoise’s godmother; with Madame de Neuillant, Jeanne even went to court at the Palais-Royal, presumably to solicit the help of some powerful person, though if so, nothing came of it.
Louise remained in Niort with the children and the farm. Though a financial pillar for Jeanne, she could also be critical of her. Always kind but also naïve, Louise adored her wastrel brother, regarding him as one of the world’s perennial unfortunates, more sinned against than sinning. Jeanne was sufficiently aware of her own dependence on Louise to avoid risking any criticism of Constant in her letters. “I feel so sorry for him,” she wrote, carefully saying nothing of her own deprivations. “I wish with all my heart that I could be with him, as he wishes. I’m sure it would bring him relief and consolation.”
Whether he wanted his wife’s company or not, Constant certainly wanted money: in the summer of 1642 he had not even been able to pay for medicines for six-year-old Françoise, who had fallen ill with a serious case of ringworm. The apothecary had been paid by her Uncle Benjamin, who, evidently not trusting his brother-in-law to pass the money on, had obliged him to sign a little declaration: “I acknowledge that I have received…the sum of seventy-two livres, which Monsieur de Villette has kindly provided as an outright gift to accommodate the urgent needs and expenses incurred by illness of Françoise d’Aubigné…” Jeanne, not yet aware of the payment and so not yet embarrassed by it, apologized to her sister-in-law simply “for the trouble this poor itcher is causing you. It was so very good of you to have taken her in. God grant she may be able to repay you for it someday…” And she signed the letter with a more than conventional declaration of subservience and fidelity: “I trust that one day I will be able to be with you as much as possible, rendering you my services, my most honoured sister. Your most humble, most faithful, and most obedient servant, J. de Cardilhac.”
To this letter, Constant replied, through Louise, by return of post. He told Jeanne that he had had enough of waiting for her to return, and had himself initiated a case against her in the local Niort court. She had been paid the money from the Caumont d’Adde family, he insisted, 14,000 livres of it, and she was living off it in Paris, “having abandoned, against all the demands of justice, her imprisoned husband and her daughter, six to seven years old,” the latter being in consequence “in great danger of being turned from the Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman religion, and spiritually corrupted” at the hands of the Huguenots who had taken her in. This danger was causing “greater concern” to Constant, or so he had declared, with fantastic hypocrisy, in his deposition to the court, “than all the other afflictions that I am now suffering.” Louise herself added that she had taken her brother’s part, that Jeanne had been too long away, that she was wrong to hold Constant’s “bit of misbehaviour” against him, and that her own behaviour itself could scarcely be justified.
Jeanne’s response this time was swift and spirited. She suggested that Louise “cast aside your sisterly passion and imagine yourself in my place.” It was true that she had received a small sum from the sale of Agrippa d’Aubigné’s château in Switzerland, but this had long since been spent. For the past eighteen months, she wrote, she and the boys had been living “on the providence of God and nothing else,” or, more specifically, on less than five hundred livres. “I haven’t a penny to my name,” she insisted, “and I owe money to everyone, to three quarters of the people in the house we were in, to the baker, and others…I’ve had to sell all my furniture, and cheaply, too, in a single lot, since the landlord refused to let a stick of it leave the house until the rent arrears were paid, and we’re now in a convent, living on the generosity of an honourable and virtuous lady, but only until Michaelmas. That’s the only help I’ve had that I felt I could accept. It’s true that other people have offered to help me,” she conceded, “but only under certain conditions…You call it a bit of misbehaviour on your brother’s part to leave his wife and children in a situation like this…It’s time I learned my lesson…In future I’ll take care of things myself…You should approve of all this. I know that I have Go
d’s blessing. He sees into my heart…” There followed a brusque, conventional signature: “Your most obedient and humble servant, J. de Cardilhac”—with the afterthought, perhaps a little anxious: “And my brother’s humble servant, too.”
Jeanne does not seem to have been exaggerating. The Paris courts soon declared her bankrupt, and Constant dropped his case; even Caumont d’Adde’s son-in-law went home to Niort, though he did not give up: for the rest of Jeanne’s life he was to harry her, though unsuccessfully, for the money she had received from Agrippa’s Swiss château. The five-year battle had cost her almost everything, not least her dignity. She had refused to prostitute herself to some wealthy “protector,” as her reference to “certain conditions” suggests, but she had not been able to avoid the next-to-last lady’s refuge of “taking in” work—doing small pieces of embroidery and basketwork for the better-off people of the town. This was a double humiliation to her genteel soul, since, in addition to an admission of poverty, it was a degradation to the ranks of those who laboured with their hands.
Jeanne had never received much formal education, but her letters reveal a woman of intelligence and moral strength. She was now thirty-one years old, to all intents and purposes alone with her two sons, aged eight and thirteen. The three of them would be safe at the convent “until Michaelmas,” that is, for three months, until the autumn of 1642. In the meantime, and perhaps afterwards as well, her only consolation, it seemed to her now, would be found in her religion. Given her girlhood in the prison and her years with the irreligious Constant, it is curious that Jeanne should have found her way to the writings of one of the most farsighted churchmen of the day, “one of our Catholic authors, the late Bishop of Geneva,” as she called him, in fact none other than the great humanist François de Sales, later a saint in his own Church and a fount of practical wisdom for Christians of every kind. Perhaps it was the same “honourable and virtuous lady” who was paying for her keep in the convent who had directed her towards him; in any case, his words were of comfort to her now—though one piece of advice she must have read ruefully: “Widows should not take up lawsuits,” wrote the virtual widow Jeanne, relaying the Bishop’s advice. “He says it generally has bad consequences.”
Jeanne and the boys remained in the convent well beyond Michaelmas, and might perhaps have stayed for years had it not been for the death, in December 1642, of Cardinal Richelieu, who five years before had declined her request to set Constant at liberty. King Louis XIII, anxious to distance himself from the unpopular policies of his late prime minister, announced a flourish of political amnesties. Prisons were opened around the realm, among them the prison at Niort, and Constant breathed the air of freedom at last. He paused long enough to collect his unwilling seven-year-old daughter from Mursay, then took the road for Paris, and it was there, in the early months of 1643, that Jeanne and the boys and their father, and Françoise, came together to be remade as a family.
And in the same city, at the same time, the royal family itself was being remade. The death of Louis XIII in May, at the age of forty-one, had left a little boy just four years old on France’s Bourbon throne. In political terms, at least, the new King Louis XIV was perched most unsteadily.
Two
America!
The d’Aubigné family had been remade with limited success. In theory, Jeanne had been pleased about it; her husband was finally a free man, and her daughter had been returned to her. But the daughter’s appearance had struck no chord of love in Jeanne’s maternal breast. Since her infancy Françoise had been more or less another woman’s child, and she came into the family home now as a stranger. And if the child was unknown, the husband was only too familiar, the same man that he had always been, untempered by his time in prison: high-spirited, hot-tempered, still spouting grandiose schemes, hopelessly unreliable, and, above all, without a penny in his pocket. If there had ever been love between husband and wife, or even a sexual bond, it had long since dwindled away. Custom and religion and simple lack of alternative kept Jeanne beside Constant now. As for Constant, he stayed beside Jeanne when it suited him, wandering away from Paris periodically, in search of work, perhaps, more likely in search of his daydreams. How the family lived for the next year or more remains unclear, but it is certain in any case that they did not live well. Constant must have been a charmer to the core; despite his reputation, he was still able to borrow money, and at the end of 1643 he even received 1,000 florins, bequeathed to him, when old Agrippa was past knowing of it, by his widowed stepmother in Geneva, herself perhaps prompted by Constant’s illegitimate half-brother, Nathan.
With his elder son and namesake, now fourteen years old, Constant seems to have had no rapport. Five years of hardship and anxiety had worsened the boy’s naturally melancholy turn of mind. He was withdrawn and lethargic; though close to his mother, who was very protective of him, he does not seem to have made any emotional connection with any other family member, including his rediscovered little sister, whose apparently engaging personality might have been expected to draw him out of himself somewhat. By contrast, the younger boy, Charles, formed an immediate bond with her. Just one year older than Françoise, he slotted neatly into the place left vacant by her favourite Mursay cousin, Philippe. The two became a pair, learning their lessons together and covering for each other in their childhood scrapes. Charles, the absolute opposite of his brother, blessed or cursed with their father’s ebullient temperament, was restless and adventurous, given to the moment. His natural charm and persuasiveness captivated Françoise, and she loved him fiercely, as she was to do through sixty years of profligacy and irresponsibility on his part, and forbearance and generosity on her own.
She had need of her brother’s affection, since none was forthcoming from her mother. Reunited with her only daughter after an absence of years, Jeanne had taken an immediate disliking to her, kissing her “only twice,” we are told, “and only on the forehead” they were the last kisses she was ever to bestow on her. Françoise was now a bright and black-eyed eight-year-old, very pretty, with curly dark hair. Her often serious expression was apt to give way to sudden flashes of humour, but she could be stubborn, too, a trait which did nothing to endear her to her mother. A supposed Protestantization in the house of her Aunt Louise was the readiest excuse for the disciplining of Françoise; she was certainly slapped, and probably pushed and pulled about now and then, but her tough little spirit stood firm. “My mother brought us up very strictly,” she was later to say. “We were never allowed to cry if we fell over or burned ourselves with a candleflame or had any other kind of little accident.”
She was diligent at her lessons and a willing helper in the house, though rather untidy, it seems, which may have been enough to provoke her mother when the charges of incipient Protestantism wore thin.
Françoise appears to have received her earliest religious education by a kind of osmosis rather than by any direct instruction. She had lived five years at Mursay in a staunchly Huguenot home, with regular family prayers and readings from the Bible; from this, by the age of eight, she would have been familiar with the best-known biblical stories and New Testament parables, at least. There had been, of course, no Catholic symbolism at Mursay, no holy pictures or statues or rosary beads, and few stories of saints or martyrs. Louise and Benjamin had not obliged her to attend their temple services, but neither had she been taken to the Catholic mass, so that by the time she arrived with her father in Paris, she was Catholic only formally, by her baptism. Her mother, observing this with dismay, decided to put things back on the right footing. She took the child to a Catholic church, an environment wholly unfamiliar to her, with its residual smells of incense and its images of torture on every side. In years to come, Françoise would relate how she had refused to make the conventional gestures before the altar, turning a defiant back on it. Jeanne had slapped her there and then.
There is no reason to read any precocious religious heroism into this incident. A strong-willed child was be
ing forced to do something that she did not want to do by an equally strong-willed mother. The church must have seemed a bizarre and alarming place to Françoise; the images no doubt frightened and repelled her. It is not known whether there was any service in progress during this first visit, but if so, she would have heard only the alien sounds of Latin chants and recitations, nothing familiar, not even a hymn, and certainly nothing to reassure her. There was no bond of trust or affection between mother and daughter that might have softened the effect of so much unwelcome novelty; no wonder, then, that the result should have been contention.
Jeanne, so forbearing with her unhappy elder son, had no patience to spare for her daughter. The little girl, a child in perfect health, clever, helpful, warm-hearted, even beautiful, might have been greeted by her mother with joy, as a lost treasure now found again. Instead, as the youngest and, perhaps, the most vulnerable member of the family, and possibly, too, as a sudden embodiment of her mother’s younger self, she appears to have served as a whipping-boy for Jeanne’s many fears and frustrations. There was nothing to be gained by remonstrating with Constant, and Jeanne also recognized a measure of culpability in herself: writing of “the difficulties which his bad behaviour has caused,” she said, “I have always accepted them and I will endure them as long as it pleases God, since I’ve well deserved the treatment I’ve received”—a reference, perhaps, to her own “sin” as a sixteen-year-old in allowing herself to be seduced by her father’s prisoner. Guilt over the past, whether warranted or not, was thus added to present misery and anxiety for the future. It is not surprising that Jeanne needed an outlet for the weight of all this; it is only sad that she found it in bullying her wholly innocent daughter. “She did not like to talk about her mother,” the adult daughter’s secretary was to record, decades afterwards.
The Secret Wife of Louis XIV: Françoise d'Aubigné, Madame de Maintenon Page 3
