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

by Veronica Buckley

  Saint-Cyr was in fact a very unusual place. To begin with, it was not a convent—the only educational institution for girls in all of France that was not. Its thirty-six teachers, the dames of Saint-Louis, took simple vows of chastity and obedience, but they were not nuns bound by the solemn vows of formal profession. They did not wear habits, but dressed instead in the style of the more serious ladies of the court, in good quality gowns, modest, certainly, but also elegant.

  The girls themselves, 250 of them between the ages of seven and twenty, were even dressed rather splendidly. They were divided into four groups, according to age, with each group’s gowns and ribbons a different colour: red for the youngest girls, then yellow, then green (Françoise’s favourite), and for the eldest girls, the King’s royal blue. Far from the beggar-girls’ woollen dresses, or even Françoise’s own genteel muslins from the days of her young widowhood, the gowns of Saint-Cyr’s demoiselles were of beautiful silk, rustling along the cool white floors with the sound of fine ladies in the making.

  “Ladies,” or at least gentlewomen, the girls were certainly to be in the end, and this goal added scope to their education, which was otherwise designed essentially after the Ursuline fashion, as preparation for Christian motherhood, the vital and peculiarly female contribution to mankind’s eternal salvation: “Young girls will reform their families, their families will reform their provinces, their provinces will reform the world.” The inculcation of Christian values lay at the base of all instruction at Saint-Cyr, though, as with the Ursulines, this meant learning the Church’s catechism and the habits of Christian living rather than theology or biblical exegesis: “I don’t know anything about the scriptures,” said Françoise, implying, perhaps, that her girls need not know anything about them, either. For the older girls, the “blues,” lessons in Christian humility doubled with lessons in practical housekeeping: they were all obliged to help take care of the younger ones, and also, working on a roster system, to sweep out the dormitories and assist the converses (the servant sisters) in the laundry and refectory.

  Naturally, all the girls learned to sew, not only to make and mend simple clothes and household linen, but also, innovatively, to work needlepoint tapestries for furniture. In this endeavour, one of the girls, or one of the dames, or possibly Françoise herself, a skilful practitioner, developed an especially robust new diagonal stitch, later to become famous as petit point (basketweave). Chairs and cushions worked in the useful new stitch subsequently made their appearance in all of Françoise’s many apartments, and thence around the world.

  Within the well-behaved Ursuline framework of Saint-Cyr, Françoise had introduced a number of very un-Ursuline activities for her 250 demoiselles. To begin with, there was dancing: “All girls learn the minuet. There are quite a number of minuets arranged for four, eight, twelve, or sixteen, and every class gives a performance once a year for the dames and the other girls.” Every afternoon, classes adjourned for an hour-long promenade in the grounds, during which, or so Madame de Brinon assured Madeleine de Scudéry in a large and regular hand, “our young ladies read aloud from your own Conversations, delighting themselves and their companions.” On Saturdays there were no classes at all, though there might be some revision of what had been learned during the week. And the girls were permitted games: pick-up sticks, bagatelle, even chess.

  Every girl was taught to read music, and to sing plainchants and motets and other songs, both sacred and secular. But, possibly because of her own lack of musical training in girlhood, Françoise had decided there would be no instrumental teaching. “Madame de Maintenon thought it wasn’t possible to teach music in general to young ladies as they do nowadays,” one of her pupils, a subsequent teacher at Saint-Cyr, was to report in later years. “That’s why they just learned the plainchant, which she regarded as much easier, and of course it was going to be useful for any of them who wanted to be nuns, but as it turned out, the girls were really bored with it, and it was useless anyway, a waste of time, because most of them wouldn’t put any effort into learning it.”

  There was in fact only a single music teacher for all 250 girls. He was the organist Guillaume-Gabriel Nivers, a full-time member of the staff, recruited, perhaps significantly, by Madame de Brinon, and even he seems to have proved too much for the evidently unmusical Françoise. The religious services at Saint-Cyr, fewer than in the convent boarding-schools but all overseen by Nivers, contained more music than anything else; to such an extent, in fact, that by the end of the first year Françoise was complaining that “there are too many songs, too many ceremonies, too many processions: in a word, the organist forgets that most of our dames can’t really sing, and anyway they need to save their voices for talking to the girls.” This did not prevent various earnest composers producing songs of praise for the new Maison royale de Saint-Louis, songs in fact mostly in praise of its distinguished (and now well-to-do) founder:

  Lord, conserve our only hope! She who leads us to the foot of your altars is the protector of innocence. Prolong her days for the benefit of mortals.

  Thus the “Prayer for Madame de Maintenon,” one of the many “spiritual airs” collected for the girls to sing when the plainchant lessons reached the limit of boredom.

  The dames “need to save their voices for talking to the girls,” Françoise had insisted, and talking to the girls was indeed important, for most of the lessons proceeded orally. Apart from among the youngest girls, there was surprisingly little reading or writing in the classes. Instead, instruction was given by way of “conversations” on social or moral questions, usually composed by Françoise herself, which would be read aloud by several of the girls, exemplifying the attitude or behaviour appropriate to each circumstance. Françoise had drawn the model for these from the popular Conversations of her friend Madeleine de Scudéry, for whom she had by now arranged a royal pension.

  “Experience is the best teacher. I haven’t so much learned through my intelligence as through what I’ve experienced myself,” insisted Françoise, providing the girls with the benefits derived therefrom in her conversation, “Raising Oneself Socially”:

  EUPHROSINE:

  What does it mean when you say that a person wants to raise himself? I don’t know whether it’s praise or blame.

  MÉLANIE:

  Yes, I’ve been wondering that for a long time.

  AUGUSTINE:

  But what does it mean?

  SOPHIE:

  I think it means having more courage than fortune, and wanting to raise yourself up through your own merit.

  AUGUSTINE:

  What! You mean, raise yourself above your own father?

  SOPHIE:

  Yes, and to place no limits on your ambition.

  AUGUSTINE:

  But that’s useless. You’ll always remain your father’s child. You can never be more than that.

  SOPHIE:

  You can achieve a position that makes you greater than your father.

  MÉLANIE:

  I must say your ideas are very fashionable these days, when you see lackeys driving in coaches and gentlemen going on foot. Would you say those lackeys have raised themselves?

  SOPHIE:

  Certainly, and a most praiseworthy thing it is.

  HORTENSE:

  I don’t think so at all. I’ve always despised that sort of person. I think their behaviour is insolent.

  Hortense, however, is eventually persuaded, and in the end presents a justification for Françoise’s own elevation:

  HORTENSE:

  I think one can genuinely raise oneself through merit…If a common soldier earns the rank of general through his own merit, and if some great prince then berates him for being born in the mud, he can say, Yes, it’s true, I was born to nothing, but if you’d been born where I was, you wouldn’t be where I am today.

  EUPHROSINE:

  That’s rather a daring reply!

  HORTENSE:

  If there’s anything that can raise us up to equal thos
e born above us, it’s being more courageous than they are.

  The conversations were, in effect, a form of Socratic dialogue, with arguments presented on both sides, and in due course they were expanded into a collection of “proverbes,” actually one-act plays, also written by Françoise, illustrating various common proverbs of the day (“Let sleeping cats lie” “Nothing so proud as a newly dressed beggar”), and the moral lessons to be drawn from them. Amusing and colloquial in tone, with good and bad characters, they were acted in class, like the conversations, by the girls themselves.

  And there were “instructions” and “meetings” in the form of simple chats, and at times lectures, which Françoise held with the girls or the dames, with one of the latter serving as secretary, noting down particularly whatever was said by Madame la fondatrice.

  It was an imaginative form of teaching, the result of Françoise’s practical intelligence, and very likely also a legacy of her own early lessons with the chevalier de Méré. “Far better to awaken the intelligence than to fill the memory,” he had said. “Self-confidence produces good results, provided it’s well founded and not too obvious. It encourages one to do well, and de bon air, whatever one undertakes.”

  Françoise’s conversations and proverbes were generally optimistic pieces, each no doubt written in an hour of particular exuberance. But alongside these lessons in ambition and self-confidence, the girls heard a very different message of resignation, sometimes bitter resignation, to their much more likely fates: “Reading is useful for men,” Françoise told them. “From childhood, they begin to learn the things they will need in later life…whatever their work will require…But what does that have to do with us? All we’ll have to do is obey, and hide ourselves away, lock ourselves up in a convent or within our families…Girls need to learn to prefer handiwork or housework to reading…”

  If this was the result of experience, it also represented the most advanced pedagogical theory of the time, as evinced by the young educationalist, François Fénelon. A man of brilliance and imagination, Fénelon nonetheless espoused a quintessentially conservative view of the appropriate education for girls, certainly as compared with, for example, the mixed intellectual and practical education which Madeleine de Scudéry had received earlier in her uncle’s house. “The world…is the sum of all its individual families, and who can oversee these with more care than women?” asked Fénelon rhetorically in his famous 1685 Treatise on the Education of Girls. “Apart from their natural authority and diligence in the house, women have the advantage of being born careful, attentive to detail, industrious, accommodating, and persuasive…Women’s work is hardly less important to the public than men’s. A woman has a household to manage, a husband to please, children to bring up properly…”

  Fénelon served as spiritual director to the duc and duchesse de Beauvillier, members of Françoise’s dévot circle at court and the parents of six (later eight) daughters. He had written his Treatise as a guide for the education of the Beauvillier sisters, whose background, though not poor, was similar in many ways to those of the girls at Saint-Cyr. It was through the Beauvillier family that Françoise had come to know Fénelon. She was later to involve him much more closely, and with disastrous consequences, in her own ambitious work at Saint-Cyr, but for now she was content to draw from his Treatise whatever she could use herself.

  “Take care not to make young girls unhappy by teaching them to hope for things above their wealth and rank,” Fénelon warned, in the timeless voice of the social conservative. “There are hardly any people who are not left disappointed by too-great expectations.” There was truth enough in this to leave Françoise uncomfortable with her own pedagogical touchstone of personal experience.

  But the contradictions in what her girls were now learning lay in that very fact. Françoise herself was the worst possible example for them. Her own experience of “Raising Oneself Socially,” transformed and performed with such poignant enthusiasm, was in fact so wildly improbable as to be more of a fairy tale than a guide for future living. Few of her young charges possessed the maturity to make this distinction. Just as she had seen in them a chance to remake her own imperfect girlhood, so now they regarded their beautiful, powerful fifty-one-year-old foundress as an embodiment of their own future selves. Cruelly, inescapably, what each side saw in this distorted double mirror was only an illusion.

  Madame de Brinon, first among the dames, was enormously admiring of Françoise’s literary-pedagogic accomplishments. Not content with having composed some unsingable verses for the girls to accompany the music of master-composer Lully, she determined to attempt something of the proverbes ilk herself, indeed something rather more ambitious. Quite quickly, she produced a series of educational plays in the manner of the Jesuits, who had for many years made use of drama as a powerful pedagogical tool. Françoise admired Madame de Brinon’s intentions, but the plays themselves she found, unfortunately, “execrable.” Too sensible to think herself capable of more than the enjoyable and useful scenes of her conversations and proverbes, but persuaded of the Jesuits’ theatre as an excellent method for advancing her own educational aims, she decided to appeal to talents of a higher order than her “very dear” Madame de Brinon could boast—talents, indeed, of the highest order, for directly at hand and already familiar with the constitutions of Saint-Cyr, or at least with their spelling, was the King’s own historiographer and one of the greatest playwrights of the age, Jean Racine.

  After the critical failure ten years before of his Phèdre, subsequently—though uselessly for its long-dead author—declared the masterpiece of the century, Racine had abandoned the theatre, devoting himself to the less demanding occupation of historiographer-royal to the King, a post he shared with the poet Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux. “I don’t know whether M. de Racine will acquire the same reputation for history as he has for poetry,” wrote Spanheim, “but I’m sure he’ll be a truthful historian.” Françoise knew Racine well and thought highly of him, as indeed he did of her. “She is just as she has always been,” he wrote to Boileau-Despréaux at about this time: “full of intelligence, good sense, piety, and goodwill towards us.”

  Saint-Cyr had money, and the King’s protection, and the interest of all the court. It would not be too much, Françoise thought, to request something from Monsieur Racine that her girls might study—indeed, perhaps even perform. What better advertisement of her own extraordinary accomplishment than to present to the King, to all the court, her rows of lovely demoiselles, rescued from poverty and oblivion, polished and primed, producing in their perfect new courtly accents the finest new poetry in the land? What gold would she not be said to have spun from this ragged provincial straw!

  Racine was duly approached, but, though tempted at once, he hesitated. Drama belonged to his bruised past, and moreover it was of doubtful moral standing, or so he had been taught to think by his boyhood teachers at the seminal Jansenist school of Port-Royal. But on the other hand, as a young man he had chosen to ignore them, and though in middle age he had returned somewhat to their teachings, the urgency of his poetical gift once again proved stronger than the demands of his theology. He cast aside his Jansenist appellation of “public poisoner,” and began looking about for a subject.

  He did not have far to seek. Françoise had requested “something moral or historical, but there mustn’t be any love in it, something with a lively action, where the music can fit in with the poetry.” The absence of “love” was vital: the girls at Saint-Cyr had already proved only too interested in an earlier play of Racine’s to which Françoise had introduced them: it was Andromache, a riveting exposition of a circle of endlessly frustrated passions: of Orestes for Hermione, of Hermione for Pyrrhus, of Pyrrhus for Andromache, and of Andromache for her dead husband, Hector.

  In earlier days, Racine had generally drawn his subjects from the legends and tragedies of Greece, but this time the precedent would not serve: the Greeks talked constantly of “love.” He turned instead to th
e Bible, and in the Old Testament Book of Esther he found exactly the subject he needed: during the Jewish captivity in Persia, Esther, the Persians’ unwilling Queen and secretly a Jewess herself, risks her life to save her people, whom the King’s wicked favourites, Aman and his wife Vasti, have plotted to destroy. “It is a story filled with lessons in the love of God,” as the religious Racine reported, “and also,” added his theatrical self, “I had no need to change even the smallest detail of the action as shown in holy Scripture, which would have been, in my view, a kind of sacrilege, so that I could write the entire play using only the scenes which God Himself, as it were, had provided.”

  It was a disingenuous claim, all the same, for into the scenes which “God Himself” had provided, Racine built his own element of subversion: his Esther is a parable of persecution in France—not of the Jews, however, nor even of the Huguenots, but of his own stubborn Catholic sect of Jansenists. “When Racine moved from the theatre to the court, he became a shrewd courtier,” wrote Spanheim, and certainly the poet had been careful not to place the Persian King in the villain’s role. That doubtful honour passed instead to Louis’s hard-line Jesuit confessor, Père de la Chaise, who had led a recent charge against the Jansenists by forcing the closure of one of their schools. To Père de la Chaise, in parable, went the role of Aman, who ends, satisfyingly for the Jansenists, by acknowledging the superior theology of his enemies, before being led off to execution by the King’s guards.