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

by Veronica Buckley

  One monarch very far from decline paid a visit to Françoise, too, rather to her surprise, in fact. Installed at her own marble Trianon at Versailles, in the middle of his second grand tour of Europe, was Peter the Great, Tsar of all the Russias, “with some girl in tow, scandalizing everyone.” Six feet eight inches in height, the ruthless great Westernizer had acquired an unsought admirer during his soujourn in France. No doubt unaware of Peter’s propensity to dispose of unwanted royal females in the nearest ice-cold convent, Liselotte wrote excitedly to her half-sister in the middle of May 1717:

  Dearest Luise, I’ve had a great visit today, from my hero, the Tsar. He’s a really good man, by which I mean he’s not the least bit affected and doesn’t stand on ceremony. He’s very intelligent and speaks broken German, but he wasn’t hard to understand, and he understood me perfectly. He’s polite to everyone and everyone likes him…Our Great Man here used to laugh when people talked about the Tsar working with carpenters and shipbuilders in Holland, but I think a man who knows fourteen trades is never going to die of hunger…

  Talk of the Tsar’s extended visit to France was constantly swirling about Saint-Cyr as well. Though Françoise had declared her own “hero” to be Peter’s now-vanquished enemy, King Karl XII of Sweden, she was prepared to accept the victor of the northern wars on his own terms. “The Tsar seems to me to be a very great man,” she wrote cheekily to Marthe-Marguerite in Paris, “now that I’ve heard he’s been asking after me.” It was almost a month, all the same, before she met him in person, and even then, though neither party was personally fond of ceremony, it was a most unusual meeting for the Tsar of all the Russias and the widow of a Bourbon King. On an afternoon in June, just as Françoise was about to add her signature to one of her regular letters to Marthe-Marguerite, a servant entered to inform her that “he” wanted to pay a visit after dinner—“he being the Tsar. I didn’t dare say no and I’m just going to wait for him here in my bed…I don’t know whether he expects some kind of formal welcome, whether he wants to see the building, or the girls, or whether he’ll go into the chapel—I’ll leave it all to chance.” Françoise’s postscript described the bizarrely informal meeting: “The Tsar arrived at seven o’clock. He sat down beside my bed and asked me if I was ill. I said yes. He asked me what was the nature of my illness. I told him great age and a weak constitution. He didn’t know what to say to that…Oh yes, I forgot to say, he pulled back the curtains at the foot of my bed so as to get a better look at me. Naturally, he was perfectly satisfied!”

  Star-struck Liselotte herself came to visit Françoise once, offering to bring along other court ladies to pay their compliments in the future, but Françoise declined. She had no wish, and now no need, to serve as an object of politesse or curiosity. Life at Saint-Cyr, with nothing left to prove and Louis’s daily demands at an end, was now a life of quiet happiness. “Men are tyrannical. They’re not capable of friendship as women are,” she remarked to her secretary, as they sat together in amicable indolence. Mademoiselle d’Aumale had been reading to her from the marquis de Dangeau’s informative but rather stiffly written journal of life at Louis’s court. “I’m enjoying it very much,” she wrote to Marthe-Marguerite in Paris. “It’s just a pity he doesn’t write as well as we do.”

  Her women friends, among them several of the dames, and above all the presence of the demoiselles, graced the peacefulness of Françoise’s sanctuary with a tranquil daily joy. “She always loved children,” said Mademoiselle d’Aumale. One little visitor, observing the motherly tenderness with which she spoke to various of the 250 demoiselles making their way to the chapel, remarked to her in astonishment, “You have a great many children, Madame.”

  Among them was one special little girl, plucked from among the youngest demoiselles rouges, perhaps for her mischief—“I must say I prefer the naughtier ones”—one Mademoiselle de la Tour, seven or eight years old, Françoise’s last little second-self. She was brought to live in Françoise’s own rooms, to keep her company, perhaps, but more likely just to be spoiled and petted as Françoise had never been by her own unloving mother. Unlike the other demoiselles, who called Françoise “Madame,” the little de la Tour was invited to call her “maman.” Françoise taught her to read, rehearsed her catechism with her, and, one day, gave her a silver tea service to play with. “I’m a bit hesitant to let her play with it,” she said, but then, thinking, perhaps, of another little girl and another little tea service in the prison at Niort so many years before, she added, “Let her have it. Silver is what she’ll need to help her in the future.”

  “I’m well, but I’m going,” replied Françoise to a visitor’s enquiry after her health. At eighty-three, she was preparing for death. Divested, of her own will, of almost all her possessions and money, she began to burn all the letters she had received in more than sixty years of constant correspondence. Copies of the letters and notes which she herself had written—some 60,000, it is thought—were also burned, and though Mademoiselle d’Aumale and the other dames did what they could to save some, the most personal among them, and particularly those from Louis—“a great many”—were all destroyed by Françoise’s own hand. “Now I can no longer prove that I was ever in the King’s good graces,” she said, “or that he ever did me the honour of writing to me.” And she added, “We should leave as little of ourselves behind us as we can.”

  Towards the end of March 1719 she fell ill with a violent fever, a remnant, perhaps, of the long-ago malarial fever which had so nearly taken her life on board ship for the Americas. On April 4, she took to her bed. Though the spring flowers had arrived, the weather remained bitter, and Françoise, always sensitive to the cold, had her room rearranged to give more protection against the chill draughts, sending for some of the littlest girls to be brought in from their freezing dormitory to sleep within her warmer walls. Thinking, perhaps, of the bleak months she had spent so long ago in La Rochelle with Charles and Constant and Maman in their unheated attic room, she also sent money to the village for the purchase of firewood for the poor.

  Marthe-Marguerite came from Paris to see her, and stayed eight days, from morning till evening, talking and reading to her. Marthe-Marguerite was now a widow, the drunkard comte de Caylus having died during the last war—“probably the only gentlemanly thing he’d ever done for his wife”—and the mother of a very promising son, Anne-Claude, destined to become famous as one of Europe’s first scientific archaeologists.

  On April 12, Françoise’s fever abated somewhat, though she seemed weaker. She was bled, but only once, and after a great deal of protest. A sudden craving for goat’s milk took her, but she found she could not drink it after all. On April 13, she read again her last will and testament, making some small changes—“and you see my handwriting’s still firm,” she said. But she had given away already almost all she had possessed, leaving so little to be bequeathed that, as she remarked, “People will make fun of this.” And she crossed out the too grand title, “Will and Testament,” overwriting it with a simple “Distribution of What She Had.” Little Mademoiselle de la Tour, seeing her making her will, insisted on making one of her own. It was placed in a small box together with Françoise’s, but later removed. “Take it out,” said Françoise to Mademoiselle d’Aumale. “It will make mine look ridiculous by comparison.”

  On April 14, her pulse grew suddenly stronger. “Yes, I do feel better,” she said to those at her bedside, “but I’m still going.” “She was full of chat and witticisms right to the very end,” said Mademoiselle d’Aumale.

  The spring storm that had been gathering for days broke that night, and Françoise’s fever worsened. A mass was said in her room; she took Communion, with the priest offering to hear her confession, but no, she said, there was nothing troubling her conscience that she needed to confess. And seeing the various people standing expectantly around her bed, she flung them an instruction to go: “Am I in my last throes that you’re all standing there?” she said.

  But
in the morning, when the storm had cleared, her confessor decided it was time to administer the last rites. Françoise, drowsy and very weak, told him that she had been expecting him. When he asked her to bless her demoiselles, she replied that she was not worthy to do so, and when he insisted, she raised her hand in a blessing, but had no further strength to speak a word. Later in the day, Françoise-Charlotte-Amable and her husband visited her for the last time. The duc kissed her hand. “How are you?” he asked. “Not too bad,” she replied, before falling asleep once again.

  “It seems that God wanted to spare her the horrors of death,” wrote Mademoiselle d’Aumale. “She was almost three hours in her last agony, but it was just like a very tranquil sleep; there was nothing frightening about it. Her face looked more beautiful and more noble than ever…” At five o’clock on that spring evening of April 19, 1719, she died.

  Françoise had expressed the wish to be buried as an ordinary sister, in the cemetery alongside the chapel at Saint-Cyr. But, following the dames’ wishes, the duc de Noailles agreed that her body should be buried within the chapel itself. The heart was not removed for separate keeping in a place of special affection to the deceased, as was usual before a noble’s burial, “because we preferred to have the entire treasure in the same place”—her old childhood haunt of Mursay perhaps excepted, there was in any case no place of greater affection in Françoise’s heart. Though the body was embalmed, “it was not opened for the embalming, but simply covered in all kinds of aromatic ointments.”

  The body was laid in a lead coffin, which itself was placed in an outer casing of oak. For two days, the body lay exposed in Françoise’s old room, while the dames and demoiselles filed past, “in such a state of grief that none of us could do anything but weep.” On the evening of April 17, the coffin was closed and carried to the chapel, with the dames processing behind it, and the 250 demoiselles with lighted torches in their hands. A grave had been prepared at the front of the chapel, between the girls’ benches and the sisters’ stalls, and into this the coffin was laid, while a bishop recited a restrained prayer above it. The Lazarist priests, chaplains at Saint-Cyr, sang the office of the dead. There was no funeral oration, and no one from the court was present, as Françoise herself had wished. “What a noise this event would have made throughout Europe, if it had happened a few years ago!” declared the duc de Saint-Simon. But Louis the Sun King had been four years in his grave, and, out of sight of the great world in perfect seclusion, his secret widow had faded quietly out of mind.

  On the following day, a requiem mass was said in the chapel for the repose of Françoise’s soul, and here the clergy excelled itself with a lengthy and florid oration on the exceptional qualities of the deceased, praising and lamenting “our wise, modest, gentle foundress, most noble of birth, the like of which we shall seek again in vain, mother to the poor, refuge of the unfortunate, unwavering in her goodness, faithful in the exercise of piety, tranquil amidst the turmoil of the court, simple amidst its grandeur, humble though crowned with honours, revered by Louis the Great, bathed in glory, a second Esther in royal favour, a new Judith in prayer and contemplation, loving and beloved through all the years of her long and illustrious life, now ended in a saintly death.”

  “Such a prodigious elevation, from such depths!” sniffed the duc de Saint-Simon.

  “The old hag’s croaked at last,” wrote Liselotte.

  Some time after Françoise’s funeral, a plaque of black marble was placed over her place of burial, engraved with the superlaudatory words of the oration delivered in her honour. Had she known of it, she would no doubt have protested that it was far more than she deserved, and indeed, in its extravagance, not even to her taste. And certainly, a plainer epitaph would have been more in keeping with the modest face she had chosen to present to the world, and more in keeping, too, with her straightforward religious faith.

  “Saint Paul declares it’s terrible to fall into the hands of the living God. Well, I don’t believe that,” she had stated roundly to Mademoiselle d’Aumale. “I can’t think of anything sweeter than to fall into the hands of God.” Françoise had said “more than a hundred times” that she could not believe she would be damned, after all the blessings God had given her in this life. Mademoiselle d’Aumale had said that, as for herself, she lived in fear of the Last Judgement, afraid she’d be sent to hell. “Ah, mon Dieu!” Françoise had exclaimed in response. “I’ve never considered that for a second. It’s true I’ve been no saint, but I’ve done my best. That’s all God asks. No, that’s impossible. I won’t be going to hell.”

  In these last tranquil years at Saint-Cyr, Françoise had acquired a perfect peace of mind—very near, in her own understanding, to a religious state of grace. Her old anxieties about spiritual pride and inability to pray had long been laid aside. She had returned to the practical Christianity of her happy childhood years at Mursay, and by these simplest of religious lights, she had succeeded: she had been good to her family, generous to the poor, devoted to her difficult husband. There was nothing on her conscience and no sin on her soul. “I’ve done my best,” she had said. “That’s all God asks.” For this, by the terms of the believer’s great bargain, she was entitled to expect a reward. The reward that Françoise expected was not sainthood, nor glory, but simply the meeting at last of her deepest needs, the needs which had kept her striving through more than eighty extraordinary years: a measure of recognition, and a lasting safety.

  Epilogue

  The body of Madame de Maintenon had not been laid to any final rest. Seventy years later, in the summer of 1789, rioting in Paris signalled the beginning of the great Revolution that would shatter forever the life of the old regime that had been Françoise’s own.

  In the anticlerical frenzy of the Revolution, all “houses of religion” were suppressed. In November 1793, Saint-Cyr was declared a military hospital, and its chapel converted to a hospital ward. As the stalls in the choir were being removed, the marble gravestone beneath them was revealed. Seeing the noble name engraved on it, the workmen broke the stone, hauled out the coffin, and forced open first the layer of oak, then the interior lead case. The embalmed body inside was still perfectly preserved. They pulled it out and tied a rope around its neck, dragging it outside into the courtyard and then through the streets of the town. If not for an officer’s intervention, the body would then have been set alight in a mock witch-burning, but the workmen were persuaded to delay the “execution” until the following day. During the night, accompanied by a former Saint-Cyr servant, the officer returned: the two stole the body, replaced it in its lead coffin, and buried it beside a quiet path in the garden of the institution.

  Nine years later, in 1802, the body was exhumed from the garden and reburied, with considerable ceremony, in the “Maintenon” courtyard at Saint-Cyr. A tombstone was erected, and a grille placed around the grave. But the site proved too central for a working military hospital; the courtyard was needed for other things. In 1816, the body was exhumed again, and for more than twenty years it lay undisturbed among the army stores at Saint-Cyr, by now a military academy.

  In 1836, the academy’s administrative council decided to accord it a further burial. A sarcophagus of black marble was constructed, and into this, alongside the body, they placed the things that had been found with it: pieces of the shroud, an ebony cross, shreds of parchment, a few herbs, and a lady’s shoe. The old oak coffin, broken and decayed, was buried with the marble sarcophagus in the original site in the chapel. The lead coffin was sold as scrap metal.

  In 1890, restoration work in the chapel required the grave to be opened again. The pieces of the oak coffin were carefully collected. Five years later, amid rumours that the remains buried in the grave were not in fact human, the marble sarcophagus was disinterred, and a post-mortem performed by two military physicians, on what was now no more than a huddle of bones. In the presence of the academy’s commandant and several officers, the physicians declared the bones to be “inconte
stably” those of Madame de Maintenon. A chaplain recited the prayers for the dead, and the bones, replaced in the marble sarcophagus, were reinterred in their chapel grave.

  In the summer of 1944, Saint-Cyr was badly damaged in an Anglo-American bombing raid. The chapel floor was destroyed and the marble sarcophagus ripped open, exposing the bones amid the rubble. They were removed to Versailles, and buried in the chapel there.

  And in April 1969, 250 years after Madame de Maintenon’s death, her remains were returned to Saint-Cyr for a sixth burial. The site, in the central aisle of the rebuilt chapel, was marked by a black marble gravestone, outlined in bronze, bearing a plain Latin cross and the simplest of inscriptions: “Françoise d’Aubigné, Marquise de Maintenon, 1635–1719.” It would have pleased her well.

  Notes

  One: Doubtful Origins

  private cell: There has been some debate about the exact place of birth of the baby Françoise. The Niort Conciergerie (the prison buildings), where Constant was incarcerated, adjoined the Palais de Justice (law courts), the whole being part of the large Hôtel Chaumont. Nothing of this Hôtel now remains. In his Françoise d’Aubigné: Étude Critique, Gelin claims that the baby was born not in the prison itself, but in one of the buildings surrounding the prison courtyard, basing his evidence on a phrase contained in a letter of July 23, 1642, from Françoise’s mother, Jeanne, in Paris, to her sister-in-law: in response to a complaint that she has moved into a convent and is too far away from her imprisoned husband in Niort, Jeanne replies that she is no further away now than she was “in the courtyard of the Palais de Justice.” Gelin takes this to refer to the courtyard of the Conciergerie of the Palais de Justice in Niort, and hence as proof that she was living there seven years previously, at the time of Françoise’s birth. However, at the time of writing this letter, Jeanne had just moved from lodgings in the courtyard of the Palais de Justice in Paris, and it seems much more likely that it was to this Paris courtyard that she is referring in the letter. In addition, three of Françoise’s biographers, all of whom knew her personally (Madame de Caylus, Mademoiselle d’Aumale, and the Archbishop Languet de Gergy), claim that she was born in the prison. Prisoners’ families commonly lived with them in the prison, and it seems on balance likely that Françoise was indeed born there.