The Secret Wife of Louis XIV: Françoise d'Aubigné, Madame de Maintenon

by Veronica Buckley

  Within this melee of three or four hundred thousand souls, Françoise found herself a definite country cousin, and a poor cousin at that; but nonetheless she was safer than most from the dirt and danger of life on the unruly streets. The comfortable house of the baron de Saint-Hermant stood outside the medieval walls, towards the southern limits of the city, in a newly residential quarter still under development. The baron held the prestigious position of maître d’hôtel ordinaire within the royal household, overseeing service at the King’s table. In consequence, he was entitled to live at the Louvre itself, a mile or two away, but if he did, he left at home his wife and daughters, one of whom, Marie-Marguerite, was about Françoise’s own age. Marie-Marguerite seems to have been quite a knowing city girl compared with the provincial Françoise; she certainly read poetry and, scandalously, “novels,” with or without the approval of her publicly pious aunt, Madame de Neuillant. The two girls struck up a friendship all the same, and it was in the company of the confident Mademoiselle de Saint-Hermant that Françoise now encountered at firsthand the sophisticated salon world of which she had heard from Cabart de Villermont in the Caribbean islands and the chevalier de Méré in Niort.

  A friend of the Saint-Hermant family, Cabart de Villermont was now living just a step away from their house in the cul-de-sac Saint-Dominique, and it is most likely he who first invited the girls, perhaps with the baronne along as chaperone, to spend an evening of dining and conversation at his large house in the suggestively named rue d’Enfer (Hell Street), next to the gardens of the Palais d’Orléans. The house, known as the Hôtel de Troyes, was not in fact his at all. He was no more than a lodger there, his many entrepreneurial plans having as yet borne no financial fruit, a forgivable failure in a man still not quite twenty-three years of age. His landlord at the Hôtel de Troyes, the abbé Paul Scarron, was a good deal older, already over forty, and though not rich, he was famous, or rather infamous. Author of countless clever and scurrilous verses, a scholar and a wit, a man of gentlemanly birth but no money, a failed priest, renowned ladies’ man, and general disgrace to his family, Scarron was also horribly crippled, the victim of a virulent rheumatism, brought about, some said, by his youthful debauchery. His life as an abbé, never much more than an excuse for an annual stipend, was long behind him, and he was now best known for his writing—some of it literary, much of it decidedly risqué—and for his regular evening salon, a mecca for every Parisian in search of culture or conviviality.

  Scarron’s lively salon had grown, paradoxically, out of his own disabilities. As it became ever harder for him to move about and visit others, his friends had taken to coming to him, and for some years past, he had been keeping a more or less open house. Aware of his host’s modest means, each guest was accustomed to bringing his own food or wine or firewood with him, and in this way Scarron had been able to develop his big yellow drawing-room into a veritable salon parisien, with good conversation and a good meal guaranteed to all comers. The original circle of friends remained, now forming a sort of human hub, with scores of others circling around them, residents of Paris or visitors from elsewhere, believers and freethinkers, people interested in books or art or general gossip, and, since witty conversation was always in fashion, courtiers and high society people, too. Sooner or later, everyone, even the Jesuits, beat a path to Scarron’s open door.

  It is at first surprising, given the host’s reputation, that Marie-Marguerite and Françoise were permitted to attend these salon evenings, with or without a chaperone. Most Parisian salons, and certainly Scarron’s, were places of very free speech and a good deal of intrigue in politics and love. “Monsieur Scarron’s house was full of young people, who only came because they could do as they pleased there,” noted one disapproving lady. Admittedly, Cabart de Villermont was living in the house, and Françoise’s old admirer from Niort, the chevalier de Méré, was a regular visitor, too. But the most important consideration was probably Madame de Neuillant’s wish to get Françoise married and off her hands as quickly as she could. She may have been thinking of Cabart de Villermont himself as a possible match; he was a promising fellow and only seven years older than Françoise, and he was particularly well regarded by Jeanne d’Aubigné, who had finally abandoned her fruitless legal endeavours and was now living quietly in the village of Archiac, near Niort.

  Whatever the reason, it was shortly after the New Year of 1651 that Françoise made her first entry into the yellow drawing-room in the rue d’Enfer. Despite her beautiful face and a grace of movement natural to her, it was on one basic level a clumsy entry, since Madame de Neuillant had not troubled to have any new clothes made for her, and she walked through the door in one of her old dresses, perhaps her only decent dress, which was, in any case, much too short for her.

  The occasion for this first meeting between Françoise and Paul Scarron is not known. It was a salon evening, perhaps, crowded with clever and elegant people, where even in a gown of proper length, a fifteen-year-old provincial girl, no matter how pretty, would certainly have felt intimidated. Or it may have been a quiet morning visit, with Françoise the only newcomer, stepping self-consciously into the room in her plain country shoes. Whatever the occasion, the sudden, first sight of Scarron in person proved too much for her. Overcome by horror or pity, she broke down at once in tears.

  “My body, it’s true, is most irregular,” Scarron himself admitted. “Pregnant women aren’t even allowed to look at me.” The celebrated poet, toast of the Paris salons, was seated in the middle of the room, his twisted body propped up and strapped into a large wheelchair, with a wooden tablet affixed on which he rested one clawlike hand. His own description of himself, set in a preface to one of his published verses, shows the dreadful impression he must have made, and reveals as well his infamously sardonic wit:

  This is for you, dear reader, since you’ve never seen me…I used to be a well built man, though I admit I was never very tall. Anyway, now I’ve shrunk more than a foot. My head’s a bit too big for my size. My face is quite full, considering how scrawny my body is, and I have enough hair that I don’t have to wear a wig…I can still see pretty well, though my eyes are a bit popout; they’re blue, and one of them’s darker than the other…My nose is generally quite stuffed up. My teeth used to be nice pearly squares, but now they’re the colour of wood, and soon they’ll be the colour of slate; I’ve lost one and a half on the left and two and a half on the right, and there’s a bit of a gap between one or two others, they’re a bit nibbled away…Since my legs are at an acute angle to my body, and my head is permanently bent down to my stomach, I’m a sort of human Z. My legs have shrivelled up, and my arms as much as my legs, and my fingers as much as my arms. In short, I’m a shrivility of human misery.

  Françoise recovered herself sufficiently to step forward and be introduced. “To look him in the face, she had to lean over so far she was almost on her knees”—so reported a witness of the two of them together. What they said at this first encounter is unrecorded—probably no more than a few amused civilities on his part and some quiet replies on her own. The girl’s family name may have recalled one wry tale to Scarron: years before, her impossible father, Constant d’Aubigné, had borrowed the precise sum of 1,148 livres from Scarron’s father; needless to say, it had never been paid back. If Scarron remembered this now, he would also have seen at a glance that the daughter was in no position to redeem the father’s sins, and in fact it seems that for the time being, he gave no further thought to her at all.

  Nonetheless, the meeting was fateful for them both. In the tearful fifteen-year-old, Scarron had found a far better opiate than any his apothecary had yet procured for him, and for her, from the bulbous blue eyes of this wreck of a man, the light of a bright, still distant star shone out.

  Legend has it that Scarron’s misery had been set in motion by a carnival prank of his own devising, a dozen years before, during his tenure as canon to the bishop in the provincial town of Le Mans. Bored with the usual carn
ival masks and costumes, and perhaps feeling hampered by his own cleric’s soutane, he had thrown off his clothes altogether and jumped into a vat of honey, then ripped open his mattress and rolled around in its white feathers before tearing out into the streets to harass every pretty girl who passed. It had all been too Boccaccian for the locals. They chased him to the river, where he spent the night hiding in the damp rushes. He caught a chill, then a fever, and the calvary of his rheumatism had begun.

  Two years later, Scarron had abandoned his post and returned to Paris, perhaps to attend his dying father—a famously pious parlementary counsellor nicknamed the “Apostle,” who had gone about his business for decades with tomes of Saint Paul tucked under his arm—or perhaps to seek medical advice for his own deteriorating condition. If the latter, it was only the first of many hopeless attempts to find a cure: the spa at Bourbon, to take the waters; the Charité hospital for gelatine baths; mercury pills, which brought on spasms of the muscles and nerves and eventually, so the rumour went, impotence; and no doubt every other lotion and potion from the near-useless chests of seventeenth-century medicine. Scarron’s malady was incurable, and the unknowing treatments of the day may even have made it worse. When discouragement became absolute, he would have himself carried to church, to pray for a miracle.

  On his return to Paris, bearing his pain and deformity courageously and with his sense of humour intact, he had settled first in the suitably named rue des Mauvais-Garçons (Bad Boys’ Street) in the lively Marais quarter, and then in the quieter rue d’Enfer. The move was arranged by Scarron’s own “Sister Céleste,” one Angélique-Céleste de Palaiseau, aged in her late thirties, a professed nun and, appropriately enough, one of Scarron’s former mistresses. Abandoned by a later seducer and literally left holding the baby, she had turned to Scarron for help, and he at least had not let her down. The child had been adopted, and Céleste had entered a convent, where she had lived quite contentedly until the convent itself, following the nuns’ too ambitious property speculations, had gone bankrupt. The nuns had dispersed, and Céleste had found herself once again with Scarron, this time as his nurse, an office which she apparently discharged with great care and kindness.

  It is not known whether Françoise struck up any kind of friendship with this second good-hearted Sister Céleste. During these first months of 1651, she does not even seem to have seen very much of Scarron himself, and the first impressions created at their meeting, of a pretty country girl on the one hand and a pitiful invalid on the other, remained for the time being unchanged. In the spring, Françoise set off for Niort with Madame de Neuillant, returning to her country house, as was her wont, at the end of the winter social season. Marie-Marguerite de Saint-Hermant remained with her family in Paris, but she and Françoise wrote regularly to each other, and, the lettres provinciales being elegant and amusing, Marie-Marguerite took to carrying them along with her to the salon evenings at the rue d’Enfer, where, “admired by all,” she read them aloud to the assembled company, in the custom of the day.

  The letters revealed a very different Françoise d’Aubigné from the pretty little nobody of the previous winter. Scarron was probably as surprised as anyone else, though the letter he now sent to Françoise suggests otherwise, perhaps with more gallantry than truth:

  Mademoiselle, I had my suspicions that the little girl who walked into my room six months ago in a dress too short for her, and who burst into tears (I can’t imagine why), was every bit as bright as she seemed. Your letter to Mademoiselle de Saint-Hermant is so witty that…I’m annoyed with myself for not taking more notice of you before. To tell you the truth, I would never have believed that anyone could have learned to write so well in the islands of America or in the Ursuline convent at Niort. You took more trouble to hide your light under a bushel than most people take to show theirs off. But now that you’re discovered, I trust you won’t refuse to write to me as well as to Mademoiselle de Saint-Hermant…

  Françoise did not refuse, egged on, perhaps, by her experienced schemer of an “aunt,” the baronne de Neuillant. Françoise’s letters to Scarron have not survived, but some of those which he wrote to her were kept, and they reveal a gradually more galant tone as the correspondence progresses. Most probably, this meant no more than that Scarron was feeling freer to indulge in his usual flirtatious banter; perhaps it provided an outlet for the fantasies of a once notorious lover of the fair sex, now hopelessly infirm. As the summer went on, the “little girl” became a “young girl,” and at last a tormenting “absent beauty.” “I should have been more wary of you the first time I saw you,” he wrote, “but how could I have guessed that a young girl would end up troubling the heart of an old fellow like me?”

  It is not at all likely that Scarron had really fallen in love, despite his impassioned tones. The last time he had seen Françoise, she had been for him no more than a “little girl in a dress too short for her.” Moreover, a man in his physical condition would have been wary of making genuine epistolary love to any fifteen-year-old, even if she did seem bright. Instead, ten or twenty charming letters had turned the relationship between them into a conventionally circumscribed flirtation, typical of the period, with Scarron in the role of declared “lover,” and a mutual admiration of elegant turns of phrase on either side. It was a game, and it is a measure of Françoise’s advancing sophistication, and of her enjoyment in this gallantry at a distance, at once provocative and safe, that she had learned to play it so quickly and so well. Scarron’s own letters give a hint of it: “You say,” he writes, “in that teasing way that makes me really desperate, You only love me because I’m pretty. Well I certainly don’t love you because you’re ugly.” Evidently not: by now Françoise was receiving, with apparent equanimity, rhapsodic verses about her “white, plump, naked body, lying on the bed with her legs spread out.”

  And at the end of the summer, when she returned to Paris, things began to change in earnest, not because of any new or stronger sentiment between them, but through the realization that each might be of practical benefit to the other, not just for the pleasure of a harmless flirtation, but solidly, and in the long term. “Come back, in God’s name, come back!” Scarron had implored melodramatically, and in the autumn of 1651 she had done so, tagging along with Madame de Neuillant on her customary return to Paris for the season of banquets and ballets. And from this point, Françoise and Scarron apparently saw each other every day.

  If further proof were wanted that Scarron’s flirtatious correspondence with his “little tigress” was, at least at the start, not meant to be taken too seriously, his astonishing plan to go to America surely provides it. Barely able to move, totally dependent on others for his most basic daily needs, the incorrigibly hopeful poet had persuaded himself that his health could be regained in the sultry heat of the Caribbean islands, and throughout the period of his correspondence with Françoise he had been steadily making plans to go. Cabart de Villermont had encouraged him, naïvely or irresponsibly, with exaggerated stories of cures brought about spontaneously by the climate, the food, and the general way of life there; the desperate Scarron was only too willing to believe him. America’s lesser seductions of fortune and freedom enticed him, too. Like Constant d’Aubigné and so many others, he viewed the new island colonies as a collective El Dorado where the smallest investment could multiply fantastically, “where the earth yields wealth without labour, no cash, no taxes, no usury, a land of peace and abundance, with fresh fruits all year round, and the finest fish cheaper than fish-hooks, and sugar cheaper than water, and the daughters of the Incas to make love to…”

  And as a final temptation, the islands were far away in every respect from the restrictions and anxieties of Paris, “my own dear town, where so many good people are about to become destitute, thanks to the civil war.” For, throughout France, the Fronde was being enflamed into a further bloody phase by the irrepressible prince de Condé. On September 5, 1651, his thirteenth birthday, King Louis XIV had attained his legal
majority; Cardinal Mazarin, still in exile, had been invited back into the royal fold, and Condé himself pointedly excluded from any place in the new government. Over the following weeks, from his own fief in Bordeaux, he had begun raising an armed force against the King, with the declared aim of driving Mazarin out of the country once and for all. In Paris, a supportive parlement had put a price on the Cardinal’s head and, even more alarmingly for him, it seems, had set about selling off the 40,000 books in his prized library, “the fruit of seventeen years of collecting,” as his despairing librarian wailed unavailingly. Scores of the city’s artists and intellectuals, fearful of the violence or threadbare from lack of steady patronage, began to pack up and leave, many waiting, all the same, until after the January book sale. The librarian himself at last turned his collar against the cold new wind and set off to seek shelter in Stockholm, lugging thousands of the Cardinal’s books along with him for the Swedes’ acquisitive young Queen.

  It is not known whether the scholarly Scarron turned up to see, or to profit from, the despoliation of Mazarin’s great library on January 8, 1652. In the early days of the Fronde he had evinced no strong feelings for or against the Cardinal personally. A few tame ditties poking fun at “Julius Mazarin, no Julius Caesar” had been more or less the extent of his political activity, but more determined spirits, mimicking the popular burlesque style of his literary verses, had begun to circulate witty and far more vicious attacks. The innocent Scarron was held to blame, and was viewed thenceforth as a prime agent de guerre de plume against Mazarin and, by implication, against the Regent Queen Mother and the young King.