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

by Veronica Buckley

  It was accompanied at first by crowds of Parisians, rowing down the Seine in their own little boats, waving and throwing flowers to the colonists. But one of their vessels, loaded with a stash of arms and ammunition, was suddenly declared to be secretly en route to Cardinal Mazarin; its passage was blocked, and its innocent crew dragged back to the city as treacherous anti-frondeurs. A little further along, the expedition’s missionary leader, too daring or too trusting in the Lord, attempted a dangerous crossing from one vessel to another; shortsighted, misjudging his footing, he fell into the swift spring river and was drowned. Near Rouen, one boat was smashed to pieces on hidden rocks, and when the fleet arrived at Le Havre, the seagoing vessels were found to be not yet ready. In the ensuing weeks of idleness, the colonists caused petty havoc, selling off items intended for the settlement, eating steadily through their provisions for the voyage, and developing a keen dislike of the new expedition commander struggling to keep them all under control. They put to sea at last without salted meat or vegetables, with no oil or candles, nor even a fishing-net. Those who survived the voyage set upon one another immediately on landfall, and those who survived this savagery were massacred shortly afterwards by a band of Cayenne Indians. Cardinal Mazarin notwithstanding, Scarron and Françoise had done well to remain in France.

  For a few months over the summer of 1652 Scarron continued to talk of America, but he took no further serious steps. In missing the boat he had saved his life, but lost his whole investment. But there was money coming in from his new comedy Don Japhet, written in the months before his marriage and made popular in Paris with the help of its star, the famous actor Jodelet. And a sudden windfall in June, when the courts finally awarded Scarron the disputed family lands, dispelled all immediate financial worry. Early in October 1652, with cash in hand and his new wife in tow—or rather in tow himself, for while Françoise travelled by coach, he followed behind, propped up in a litter chair—he set off southwards for the beautiful valley of the Loire.

  The newly gained family properties lay near the small medieval town of Amboise, and here Scarron and Françoise remained, possibly still thinking of America, for the next three months. Nothing is known of what they did there, except that they both grew steadily more bored. By now it was wintertime, with nothing to be done outdoors, and little enough indoors, since it was not the season for visitors to the countryside. Françoise at least had a household to run, but for Scarron, for whom a large and convivial company was now life’s principal pleasure, it was an especially dreary exile. He managed to do some writing, in fact of his Virgile Travesti, an irreverent parody of the ancient Aeneid—“It’s a good enough work to stand that kind of treatment,” he had remarked—but his heart was not in it, and the work progressed slowly, his despondency emerging instead in pieces of a less considered vulgarity: “Money will always be money,” he wrote, “and poetry good for wiping bums.”

  Though out of sight of the great world, he and Françoise were at least not out of mind. In Paris they were still mentioned in the fashionable daily news-sheets, even if with more fabrication than information. In November, Jean Loret, Scarron’s friendly rival in scurrilous verse, published the following in his Muze Historique:

  It isn’t true that he can’t move,

  As people are objecting:

  A little further time will prove

  His lady is expecting.

  It was not true, and it is not known whether Scarron was more flattered or humiliated by it, or whether Françoise blushed, or felt indignant. But the scuffs and brawls of literary life in Paris were not sufficient to keep them from wishing to return; for Scarron, in fact, they were among the city’s prime attractions. Of far greater concern was Cardinal Mazarin’s likely revenge for the purple-prosed Mazarinade; for some time, Scarron even feared he might be hanged. At the beginning of February 1653, following the King’s declaration of a general amnesty for all frondeurs, Mazarin returned to Paris in triumph; ignoring the King’s amnesty, he proceeded to take reprisals against those who had opposed him by armed force. But the pamphleteers escaped his vengeance, too small fry, it seems, for him to bother with. The consequent sudden easing of Scarron’s fears, coupled with the tedium of life in the provinces, persuaded him to return. By the end of the month he had made a first and, as it happened, a last farewell to his house in the country, and set off back to Paris.

  They did not return, however, to the house in the rue d’Enfer, which had, perhaps, a new tenant. Instead they took up lodgings with Scarron’s elder sister, also named Françoise, who lived in the lively and not overly respectable Marais district, in a very comfortable house in the rue des Douze-Portes (Twelve Doors Street). Scarron liked to call it, however, la rue des Douze-Putes (Twelve Whores Street) “because there are twelve whores living there, if you count my two sisters as one,” as he said to Jean de Segrais. His sister was in fact the long-standing mistress of the duc de Tresmes, who was also the owner of her house. The duc himself, recently widowed, lived with his twelve legitimate children around the corner in the rue de Foin, where his property backed, without apparent irony, onto a Minims convent. In the rue des Douze-Portes, Françoise Scarron had her own young boy, fourteen-year-old Louis, whom Scarron referred to as his nephew “in the Marais fashion.” Despite his quip about “Twelve Whores Street,” Scarron’s other sister, Anne, was by now no longer living in Paris.

  Françoise Scarron was fifty years of age when her brother and his young wife came to stay with her. She was an attractive woman—even the duc de Tresmes’s late wife had liked her—still pretty, with “a pleasant temperament, a lively mind, and the ability to succeed in everything she undertakes,” or so at least thought the erudite Claude Saumaise. “She likes men,” said her brother more succinctly, “and my other sister likes wine.” Be that as it might, Scarron liked her, and certainly preferred her to the duller-witted Anne; despite the seven years between them, he and Françoise had always been a close pair, and a few years before, he had made a will leaving to her “each and every piece” of his furniture, silver plate, and money in gold and silver.

  The young Françoise seems to have liked her namesake, too, showing no prudery towards this openly kept woman with her illegitimate son. Neither did the association hamper her swift entry into Parisian society; she was very soon spotted at the celebrated samedis (Saturdays) of one of the city’s grandes dames, Madeleine de Scudéry. Though this lady was forty-six years old and Françoise just seventeen, they took to each other at once, and Mademoiselle de Scudéry, an engaging portraitist of the people about her, soon immortalized her new friend in her Clélie, a lengthy romance of ancient Rome which she was then preparing. Françoise appears as a wise young beauty named Lyriane, and she is described as follows:

  She was tall, with a good figure, and a fine, even complexion. Her hair was of a very attractive light chestnut colour, her nose was pretty, her mouth just the right size, her manner sweet, refined, spirited, but modest. And to make her beauty more perfect and more striking, she had the most beautiful eyes in the world, shining, soft, passionate, full of intelligence. At times they had a sweet kind of melancholy which was altogether charming. And at times they were full of enthusiasm, which would give way to joy. The gifts of her mind were no less: wide-ranging, gentle, pleasing, well formed. She spoke precisely and naturally, agreeably and without affectation. She knew the ways of the world, and a thousand other things which she made no show of. She didn’t play the beauty, though she possessed every advantage for the role…

  Like Françoise and Scarron, Madeleine de Scudéry lived in the Marais district, with many of the city’s more liberal and licentious souls. Despite her lively salon and the romantic nature of some of her writing, she was a devout Catholic who lived on chastely intimate terms with her newly declared “admirer,” the twenty-nine-year-old historian Paul Pellisson, himself a Calvinist. She had been orphaned as a small child and, like Françoise, had been brought up by an uncle and aunt. But the young Madeleine’s educatio
n had been markedly different from that of Françoise, in fact from that of almost every girl in France. Her uncle had possessed a substantial library of classical and modern texts, in which Madeleine had been encouraged to read widely. As a result, she was one of the few well-educated women of her day, a doyenne of the bluestockings later derided to great public amusement by Molière in his play Les Précieuses ridicules. “They weren’t really the way he presented them, though,” remarked Jean de Segrais, who knew Madeleine de Scudéry. “He made that up because he knew it would look better on stage.”

  A genuine intellectual, Mademoiselle de Scudéry was also a modest and warmhearted woman with a sound practical intelligence—her uncle had insisted she learn the principles of household management alongside her Latin and Greek. But the latter had proved more useful to her: with no beauty and no fortune, she had been obliged to earn her own living as a professional writer, mixing new social ideas—most radically those concerning the position of women—with her knowledge of the classics.

  Apart from the popular version of Plutarch’s Parallel Lives which she had read with her brother in their tropical garden on the island of Martinique, Françoise knew little of the classics. But Mademoiselle de Scudéry’s social or, as they were considered, moral questions—May a woman refuse to marry? Can women produce real art and literature?—were already of interest to her, and in later years she would explore some of them herself with the seventeen-year-olds under her own wing. And in the meantime, she was definitely learning, not Latin and Greek, however, but more of the classics in her own language, and some in Italian and Spanish, too. Her teacher was not Mademoiselle de Scudéry, but Scarron himself, who was delighted to find an excellent pupil in his pretty young wife. Building on the foundations laid in Niort by the admiring chevalier de Méré, he set to making a graceful little house of culture and learning, not unbalanced by erudition, but well lit and appropriately furnished for a budding salonnière.

  Françoise’s tastes were not deeply intellectual, but she enjoyed this broadening of her mental horizons, and was grateful for it. Importantly, as she realized, it gave her a familiarity with the conversational ways of the city’s cultured classes, many of whose brightest stars were now appearing regularly within her orbit. With her skirts at last of proper length, she had no wish to emphasize her humble origins by any socially inept remarks. “Take every chance you can,” she later advised, “to learn whatever you need to avoid looking ridiculous in the eyes of the world”—a response, perhaps, to the warning given by her first teacher: “If you’ve made yourself look ridiculous even once, it’s very hard to redeem yourself.”

  But there was little chance of it. “She was very mature and extremely bright,” said Jean de Segrais, “and she rendered Scarron very good service. He consulted her on all his writings, and was very happy to take her advice.” Scarron—“I’ve always been a bit lazy”—was rather slapdash in his work, and especially disliked revising; for him, the first draft was generally the last. In such circumstances, another, cooler eye would have proved very helpful. During these years of the mid-1650s, his prime literary effort was the second part of his Roman Comique, a satirical meandering through contemporary society which his long-standing friend Cabart de Villermont claimed to have inspired. Scarron had apparently begun translating a highly controversial work by the philosopher Pierre Gassendi, who, despite being a priest, was seeking to prove that the natural world operated mechanistically, without the intervention of God. Cabart de Villermont, correctly assuming that this was hardly the way for Scarron to ingratiate himself with the court and regain his pension, persuaded him instead towards an original comedy, “so that in a way the public has me to thank for this amusing work, though I didn’t write it.”

  Whatever Cabart de Villermont’s contribution to the beginning of the Roman Comique, Françoise’s assistance continued as the weeks and months went by. And gradually, and no doubt unexpectedly, the literary discussions and the lessons she was receiving forged a bond between the unlikely husband and wife. Scarron’s work became, if unevenly, something of a collaboration between them, and the endless giving on Françoise’s part, the bathing and dressing and feeding, became a smaller part of their relationship. Scarron had begun giving, too, the only thing, perhaps, that he could give, but it was a valuable gift, and Françoise appreciated it, and the new daily reciprocity gave dignity to them both.

  At the end of February 1654, after a year as guests in the rue des Douze-Portes, Scarron and Françoise moved into a house of their own. It was a new house, not very large, and the rent they paid of 350 livres per annum was not enough to secure it for themselves. Instead, they shared it with the notorious Claude de Bourdeille, comte de Montrésor, who had only recently been pardoned by Cardinal Mazarin for the part he had played in the Fronde. Montrésor had darker doings to his credit: he had twice plotted to assassinate Mazarin’s predecessor, Cardinal Richelieu, and had fled into exile, losing all his estates, and eventually returning only to imprisonment in the Bastille. Now nearing fifty, politically uninvolved and financially barely solvent, he had begun a quiet new life in the Marais. The three shared the house with a handful of servants: Anne, the cook; Madeleine, the maid-of-all-work; and the laundry-maid, another Madeleine. Scarron’s obliging valet Mangin had taken his leave, and in his place there was Jean; and eighteen-year-old Françoise, for the first time in her life, had her own personal maid, named Michelle.

  Though comparatively modest, the new abode in the rue Neuve-Saint-Louis was a definite step up for Françoise. The unimposing street door opened into a courtyard, which faced the kitchen and scullery, storerooms, stables (though they had no horses), an outbuilding for the coach (though there was no coach), and a staircase leading to the upper floors. On the second floor, Françoise had four rooms of her own: one not much more than a passage, then a dressing-room, a pretty little sitting-room hung with red and yellow brocade, and her bedroom, large and nicely furnished with tapestries on the walls and a Venetian mirror, and, as if there were not already Madeleines enough in the house, a good gilt-framed painting of the saint of that name. There was a big bed with high bolsters, twelve little chairs and four armchairs, all covered in yellow damask, with a cabinet de toilette, a dressing-table, and some little pedestals for flowers and ornaments. The fireplace was simple but large, with not one but two andirons to support good big logs, allowing her at last the “good big fire” she had always longed for.

  Scarron’s bedroom was on the third floor, a smaller room than her own, but also well furnished, with tapestries and paintings on the walls, and a four-poster bed upholstered, like Françoise’s, in yellow damask. Here Scarron lay alone night after night, sleepless and crying out with pain, “praying to the Lord, if he would increase my torments, to increase my endurance and my faith as well.” By day, no cry was ever heard. “I support my ills quite patiently,” remarked the invalid himself, with more than truth.

  Scarron’s yellow bedroom opened onto the landing, and from there directly into the drawing-room, furnished, like the rest of the house, in yellow—Scarron’s choice, and perhaps a reflection of his terrible need for optimism and gaiety. “That yellow damask furniture would have been worth five or six thousand livres,” remarked Jean de Segrais, clearly impressed. In the centre of the drawing-room was an immense round table, encircled by twelve good chairs. The rest of the furniture was of beautiful nutwood, lined, unsurprisingly, with yellow baize. Several hundred books of classical and modern masters filled the shelves of two large bookcases. A pretty sofa de repos reclined in a corner, heavy curtains draped the windows, and on one wall hung a marvellous, sensuous new painting by Nicolas Poussin, The Ecstasy of Saint Paul, which Scarron had bought two or three years before, in an art-loving ecstasy of his own.

  All in all, the little house in the Marais was more than comfortable, suggesting to the casual visitor that Scarron was doing rather well with his verses. But those better acquainted with the household could have told a different story,
for apart from the valuable Poussin painting, almost all the furniture had been purchased with money lent by generous friends. Others were providing the logs for the “good big fire” for the lady of the house; wines and cheeses and pâtés arrived with every second visitor; the very bread and salt was bought, as often as not, with strangers’ coins.

  Scarron was used to it, and so were his friends; it had been customary, before his marriage, for guests to bring a “contribution” to his salon evenings at the rue d’Enfer. He joked about his new “hôtel de l’impécuniosité” at the rue Neuve-Saint-Louis, but Françoise was not much amused. As with her aunt and uncle at Mursay, as with the governor on the island of Saint-Christophe, as with Madame de Neuillant in Niort and her brother in Paris, and with Scarron’s sister in the rue des Douze-Portes, she was once again living more or less on charity. Though sensible enough to appreciate the gifts, she did not give way to effusive demonstrations of humility or gratitude. “The best way of conducting oneself, if one wants to avoid attracting dislike or trouble, is to fear no one and to despise no one, and to be pleasant at all times,” the chevalier had advised, and Françoise took the message to heart, maintaining an outward composure; but all the same, the humiliation of her daily dependence scratched quite sharply at her smiling public face.

  With the formal end of the Fronde in the summer of 1653, the city’s cultural life had revived. The lively salon of the rue d’Enfer had been reborn in the rue Neuve-Saint-Louis; old friends were returning, and every day Scarron’s pretty wife drew curious new people to the house. Most of them came in the evening, when, thanks to their own generosity, the table was always well spread, with plenty of wine to ensure a general conviviality.