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

by Veronica Buckley

  Far from having nothing to do, Mignon was now most days in the saddle “from three in the morning until after midday, and I attend to the wounded, and stop the men quarrelling, and I’ve never done any harm to anyone, even the ones who’ve deserved it. And when I’m not fighting I go to mass, though it’s true I haven’t been doing much else in the way of devotions…In short, I flatter myself that I’m a decent man, especially for my age…I so cherish your affection for me…Don’t believe those who speak ill of your mignon…”

  In mid-July 1690, Colonel-Général Mignon’s wish to see something “blown up” was finally answered when his adored commanding officer, the Maréchal d’Humières, began the bombardment of the ancient city of Brussels. At Versailles, Louis honoured a military hero of his own: “M. le Grand Prieur has received a diamond sword worth 1,500 pistoles,” wrote the marquis de Dangeau, while the King’s former mistress, Madame de Soubise, rushed to the army camp, where a lesser hero, her own husband, lay “badly wounded.”

  England’s entry into the Grand Alliance had overpainted Louis’s expansionist war in the Palatinate with a new, religious colour. Though the vast bulk of his army was operating aggressively in the east, or defensively elsewhere, his meagre support of James in Ireland allowed him to construe the fight now as a moral stand against the heresy of Protestantism. Louis himself understood very well the two separate issues which hung in the balance, but others at his court, including Françoise, persuaded themselves of the simpler alternative, closing their eyes to the fact that Catholic Spain had entered the lists against them. “It’s the biggest war any king of France has ever had on his hands,” declared the comte de Bussy-Rabutin, with the verve of his slippered seventy years. “The King augmented his infantry by fifty thousand men; he formed seventy militia battalions, and increased his cavalry by sixteen thousand, and his dragoons proportionately,” wrote the duc de Saint-Simon, with equal noncombatant enthusiasm.

  Françoise’s own allegiance to Catholicism, and her personal friendship with Queen Mary, may explain her enthusiasm for the Jacobite cause in England—“No one should be surprised at that; we watched the little Prince of Wales grow up”—but it does not excuse her apparent silence on the ravaging of Liselotte’s Palatinate. The savage and unprovoked invasion in the east had predated the half-hearted counter-attack in the west: if Françoise conflated them now into two aspects of the same war, as it seems she did, this suggests naïvety, or a fanaticism, or a wilful blindness, none of which reflect well on her. In fact, the latter is most likely: though her support of James’s cause was no doubt sincere, there was nothing that Françoise could have said that might have prevented the Palatinate invasion or tempered its ferocity. “As soon as you permit a woman to speak to you of important matters,” wrote Louis in his Mémoires, “it’s inevitable that she will set you wrong.” Throughout 1689 and 1690, Françoise’s extant letters contain barely a mention of the war. Unable to justify Louis’s actions, and equally unable to restrain them, she retreated into the apparently innocent everyday business of Saint-Cyr.

  There is a clear beauty about Saint-Cyr in the autumn. The simple white stone stands dignified and assured with its graceful draping of golden leaves. But as the soft light darkens to a rainy sky or the lowering grey of snow, that assurance takes on a touch of menace, and the simplicity turns bleak.

  Françoise was reconsidering her project. The hopeful early days of her grand and ambitious work had run only too swift a course. Within a handful of years, major problems had arisen, puncturing her bright confidence with worrying jabs of doubt.

  She had been proven right, at least, in one respect: it had been unwise to build on swampy ground. Many of the girls had fallen ill with malarial fevers; not a few of them had died. The groundwater itself had proved of poor quality for drinking, and the long stone dormitories were damp and cold.

  Most of the teachers had turned out to be incompetent, “the stupidest creatures I’ve ever set eyes on,” as Françoise declared. Selected by a too-enthusiastic Madame de Brinon and a much too indulgent Père Gobelin, they had had to undergo instruction themselves before being released into the classrooms. But Françoise’s own inconsistency had made things worse than the poorly trained dames could have done on their own. Months of steady and sincere effort on their part, and no doubt also on her own, would be undone in one bitter outburst or cruel change of heart. “There’s no other school where young people have such fun,” wrote Françoise of Saint-Cyr, “and even if there’s a bit too much fun, that causes far fewer problems in the end than too much seriousness.” Racine’s earnest Esther had swiftly made way for the worldly plays of Molière and Madeleine de Scudéry’s novels, all of them oozing “love.” Some mornings, the girls would be awakened by the King’s own musicians playing en force beneath the dormitory windows; a dancing monkey was brought over from Versailles to join their minuet and quadrille lessons; arithmetic classes were enlivened by an elephant plodding out the answers to simple sums with its huge, wrinkly feet. The standard whipping punishments of the day had been eschewed, with Françoise declaring, “Our maxim here is to begin with kindness,” and by the way admitting, “In fact I prefer…the mischievous girls, wilful, temperamental, even a bit stubborn.” When the bizarre French of a visiting Polish priest sent the girls into giggling fits during a chapel service, Françoise waved away the idea of any disciplining: “If you’re going to punish anyone, you’ll have to start with me,” she told the girls’ chaplain. “I was laughing harder than any of them.”

  The simple dames, most of them not long out of their own restrained convent schools, did their best to keep up with it all, while the girls quite naturally took advantage of it. But when some of her preferred “naughtier” girls, on kitchen duty as part of their training in household management, were found attempting to poison one of the less popular dames, Françoise turned on them with an alarming savagery. The culprits were hauled out and, far from being whipped, were “sentenced” to execution, for which purpose an actual scaffold was erected in the main courtyard of the school.

  There were, of course, no executions, but if Françoise had succeeded in terrorizing the girls into subsequent good behaviour, she had also left them, and their teachers, in a state of real confusion. “We must have amusements for the girls,” she would lecture the dames from the head of the main staircase, the usual place for their assemblies. “The theatre is good for them. It brings them a touch of grace, ornaments their memory, fills their heads with lovely things.” But a few weeks later, the tone of the lecture would be unrecognizably different: “If they won’t sit still in the places you’ve given them, you’ll have to chain them up. I’m going to have chains made, and they’ll be chained to the wall, shackled like dogs.” “We’re going to start treating you like slaves,” she hurled at the girls, “like the wretched of the earth, like the galley-slaves on their forced marches.” “Leave them in their rags,” she spat, turning to the dames. “Leave them in their patched-up shoes, feed them plain food, get them used to all sorts of weariness. They’re poor and they’ll always be poor.”

  If any of the untutored dames possessed a grain of native astuteness, she might have heard, beneath the viciousness of these outbursts, the voice of a profound discouragement. Despite apparent omnipotence within the confines of the school and legendary influence at court, Françoise was at the end of her silken tether. The “weariness” to which the girls were to grow accustomed was not theirs, in fact, but hers. With the best will in the world, with careful planning, plenty of money, and endless attention to detail, Saint-Cyr was somehow not working as she had intended. Frustrated and only partly comprehending, she vented her feelings on the only people who could neither restrain nor oppose her. Françoise herself was more wilful and temperamental than any of her “naughty” girls. Always inclined to action, she could work indefatigably when the path to be followed lay clearly before her. But ambivalence disturbed her: when the path was not clear, she became confused, and her behaviour becam
e erratic and aggressive.

  “The best laid plans can go awry,” observed Madame de La Fayette from the safe distance of her elegant house in Paris. “Now that we’re all dévots, Saint-Cyr is supposedly the home of all virtue and piety. But it wouldn’t take much to turn it into a place of absolute debauchery. When you think there are three hundred young girls there, up to the age of twenty, and at their very door there’s a court full of eager young men…With so many of them so close to one another, it’s hardly reasonable to think they won’t be trying to climb over the walls…”

  And, indeed, they were. Two of the older “blue” girls had been discovered in the grounds in the arms of their galants, who had quite literally climbed over the walls to meet them. A third had been abducted by a quick-thinking abbé following a performance of Esther. Even those who stayed the course through the colourful classroom grades were seldom finding the handsome young noblemen they had been led to expect as husbands. Noblemen, it seemed, whether handsome, young, or otherwise, did not want poor young noble girls for wives; they wanted rich bourgeoises of any description. Despite their guaranteed 3,000-livre dowries, most of Françoise’s girls were marrying dreary old men, not even noblemen, but clumsy, ill-bred bourgeois. One of the luckiest of the girls, sixteen-year old Marie-Claire de Marsilly, had been plucked out of her place in Esther’s choir of Israelites to marry Françoise’s own recently widowed cousin, Philippe, now aged a grandfatherly sixty-three. Philippe was at least a nobleman, with a proud record of naval service and, thanks to his cousin, a good income, but Françoise was embarrassed by the match, Philippe’s daughter Marthe-Marguerite was horrified by it, and the feelings of young Marie-Claire can be only too well imagined.

  The mismatched marriages and scandals of galanterie in fact lay at the heart of Françoise’s deep discouragement. They were symptomatic of what was fundamentally wrong with Saint-Cyr, and of what, fundamentally, could not be changed. “Take care not to make young girls unhappy by teaching them to hope for things above their wealth and rank,” Fénelon had warned. It was precisely what Françoise had been doing. Her poor but noble girls, her precious alter egos, were being left—were almost fated to be left—“disappointed by too-great expectations,” great expectations that she herself had raised.

  For whatever she said, or taught, or threatened, in the eyes of the girls she herself was the ultimate model of the poor demoiselle raised to glory. “Is it true you’re the Queen, Madame? the girls would ask her. And she wouldn’t say no; she would just reply, Don’t mention that. Who told you that?” At Saint-Cyr, as in every other place, each blossoming sixteen-year-old could believe that she, among all others, was destined for something special, until a gruff old wool-merchant came knocking at the door, asking for her hand in marriage.

  Madame de Brinon had gone from Saint-Cyr, dismissed by Françoise following a “conflict of authority,” in the words of Manseau, the administrative intendant. Père Gobelin was gone, too, gone from the world, in fact, despite or because of “a book to divert him, wine to fortify him, peaches to refresh him, partridges to nourish him, and melons to contaminate the air in his room.” Though he had remained in her service for more than thirty years, Françoise had never taken Père Gobelin very seriously as a spiritual guide, but now that he was gone, and especially given her prominent position among the dévotes, she was obliged to choose a new confessor. She approached the dévot leader Bossuet, who advised her to choose François Fénelon, whose educational maxims had formed the basis, and predicted the nemesis, of her own endeavours at Saint-Cyr. But it seems that, after the pliable Père Gobelin, Françoise was intimidated by Fénelon’s hyperintelligence and profound spirituality. Not wanting to engage him, but at the same time not wishing to be seen to gainsay Bossuet, she shrewdly asked Fénelon himself to nominate a confessor for her. He suggested the abbé Paul Godet des Marais, whom Françoise knew from his work on the Saint-Cyr constitutions.

  Insofar as it went, Godet des Marais was irreproachable. A man of wealthy background, a Sorbonne theologian, aged in his mid-forties, he had given all his money to various charities, and now lived in marked austerity, his possessions amounting to no more than one rough bed, a wicker chair, a desk, a copy of the Bible, a map of Jerusalem, and, reassuringly for the less stringently devout, a clavichord, upon which every evening he would tinkle away the stresses and strains of his pious day. Godet des Marais was a stern man and rather limited in his views, as Père Gobelin had been, but unlike him, he was a man of considerable strength of character. Where Gobelin had retreated before the force of Françoise’s will or her simple determination to ignore him, Godet des Marais stood his ground, and in so doing he brought a definite change in Françoise’s behaviour, and in the life of the girls and the dames at Saint-Cyr.

  At first he had been a reluctant accomplice, regarding Françoise’s “enterprise” as frivolous and even sinful. What was the purpose of a school for girls, he asked, unless it was a convent? What kind of women were teaching there, if they were not professed nuns? What was all this dangerous nonsense with plays and theatres, and what had it to do with instilling Christian virtues in the minds of future wives and mothers?

  Françoise was in a sufficiently self-doubting frame of mind to allow herself to be persuaded. Very quickly, Godet des Marais’s straight and narrow path became her own. The early years of the 1690s saw the end of her brief and lovely experiment in a freer, broader, happier education for girls. “We must rebuild our institution on foundations of humility and simplicity,” she now declared, with all the determination of the newly converted. “We must renounce our airs of grandeur, and complacency, and pride, and self-importance. We must renounce our pleasure in things lively and refined, renounce our liberty of expression, our worldly joking and gossiping. We must renounce, in fact, most of the things we have been doing.” Godet des Marais arranged a series of private interviews with the dames, giving each one the choice of taking the veil as a fully professed nun, with lifelong vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, or of leaving Saint-Cyr altogether. Most departed, leaving their teaching ranks to be gradually replenished by their former pupils, who, for lack of much alternative, themselves began to take the veil in ever greater numbers. Within the space of barely a year or two, Françoise’s Saint-Cyr became just one more rigid, dreary convent school, imbued with all the “miseries and pettiness” she had so wished to avoid.

  Françoise’s renunciations of pleasure on the girls’ behalf were in fact only a reflection of her own attempt to lead, in Christian terms, a better life—certainly publicly, but also, though less successfully, in private. Though widely praised for her charity and her piety, she knew that, as to the latter at least, she was making no real progress. Her entry into the world of the dévots, more than a decade before, had been at least partly fraudulent: it had been a way of making herself necessary to the King. And though her belief was genuine, as was her desire to save her soul, when she turned her face towards God, she felt within her no real spirituality. Consequently, when she turned her face to the world, clad in her dévote robes, she felt that she lacked integrity. She felt, in a word, hypocritical.

  I take communion only out of obedience…I experience no union with God…Prayers bore me…I don’t want to submit to the constraint of any pious exercises…I meditate poorly. Frankly, I see no reason at all to hope for salvation.

  So she wrote to Père Godet des Marais, telling him the quintessential truth in utterly straightforward terms. And Père Godet des Marais, despite his forty-five years and his Sorbonne theology, failed to understand her. “Your hope of salvation is founded on the mercy of O.L.J.C.,” he replied. “Saint Gregory says that the normal conduct of God towards the just is to leave them with some slight imperfections…so that they won’t become too proud. If you really weren’t conversing with God, you’d enjoy conversing with people on earth more than you do. There’s nothing wrong with taking communion out of obedience.”

  And his letters continued with precisely th
e petty, restraining, pious exercises which Françoise, unconvinced by the moral economy underlying them, had always found so pointless. “I was informed yesterday evening, Madame, that you were suffering a good deal from the toothache: God be praised! He afflicts those whom He loves. Pain is His gift to His cherished children, and I rejoice to see you numbered among them.”

  “Sins just seem to get worse when you talk about them,” sighed Françoise. And at that point she might have resigned herself to a surface piety, with no real “union with God,” had it not been for the increasing presence of François Fénelon, at court, at Saint-Cyr, and in her own personal life.

  Like Françoise, Fénelon came from a minor noble family fallen on hard times—“He was a man of quality who had nothing.” The Church had given him his livelihood, though not, it seems, quite enough of a livelihood to satisfy him. Françoise had first met Fénelon at the house of the duc and duchesse de Beauvillier, where she dined two or three times every week. He was then in his late thirties, a thoughtful, even visionary man, concealing a passionate spirituality and a keen earthly ambition beneath an exterior of perfect, polished amiability, with a marked desire to please all who met him, high-born and low. He had a sound practical intelligence, too, and, as he had revealed in his Treatise for the guidance of the Beauvilliers’ eight daughters, a first-class instinct for the education of the young. In short, despite a difference in age of sixteen years, he was a perfect soul mate for Françoise. The duc de Saint-Simon, in many respects antagonistic towards Fénelon, nonetheless described him in the following, greatly admiring terms: