Part 8 (2/2)
The fate of Mlle. de La Valliere was the same as that of nearly all royal mistresses; abandoned and absolutely forgotten by her lover, she sought refuge and consolation in religion and G.o.d's mercy. ”She was dead to me the day she entered the Carmelites',” said the king, thirty-five years later, when the modest and fervent nun at last expired, in 1710, without having ever relaxed the severities of her penance.
Of an entirely different type from Mlle. de La Valliere was that haughtiest and most supercilious of all French mistresses, Mme. de Montespan. The picture drawn by M. Saint-Amand does her full justice: ”A haughty and opulent beauty, a forest of hair, flas.h.i.+ng blue eyes, a complexion of splendid carnation and dazzling whiteness, one of those alluring and radiant countenances which shed brightness around them wherever they appear, an incisive, caustic wit, an unquenchable thirst for riches and pleasure, luxury and power, the manners of a G.o.ddess audaciously usurping the place of Juno on Olympus, pa.s.sion without love, pride without true dignity, splendor without harmony--that was Mme. de Montespan.” And these qualities were the secret of her success as well as of her fall.
From this description it can easily be divined of what nature was her influence and how she gained and held her power over the king. She won Louis XIV. entirely by her sensual charms, provoked him by her imperious exactions, her ungovernable fits of temper, and her daring sarcasm; always extravagant and unreasonable, she talked constantly of b.a.l.l.s and fetes, the glories of court and its scandals. Most exacting, yet never satisfied, she had no regard for the interests or honor of the weak king, to whose lower nature only she appealed.
Mme. de Montespan was of n.o.ble birth, being the youngest daughter of Rochechouart, first Duke of Mortemart. She was born in 1641, at the grand old chateau of Tonnay-Charente, and was educated at the convent of Sainte-Marie. Brought up religiously, she at first evinced a much greater tendency toward religion than toward worldly ambition and vanity. Mme. de Caylus, in her _Souvenirs_, wrote that ”far from being born depraved, the future favorite had a nature inherently disinclined to gallantry and tending to virtue. She was flattered at being mistress, not solely for her own pleasure, but on account of the pa.s.sion of the king; she believed that she could always make him desire what she had resolved never to grant him. She was in despair at her first pregnancy, consoled herself for the second one, and in all the others carried impudence as far as it could go.”
She was known first as Mlle. Tonnay-Charente, and was maid of honor to the d.u.c.h.ess of Orleans. When, at the age of twenty-two, she married the Marquis de Montespan and became lady in waiting to the queen, her beauty, wit, and brilliant conversational powers at once made her the centre of attraction; for several years, however, the king scarcely noticed her. Upon secretly becoming his mistress in 1668 and openly being declared as such two years later, her husband attempted to interfere, and was unceremoniously banished to his estates; in 1676 he was legally separated from her. She persuaded the king to legitimatize their children, who were confided to Mme. Scarron,--afterward Mme. de Maintenon,--who later influenced the king to abandon his mistress.
Mme. de Montespan's power, lasting fourteen years, was almost unlimited, and was the epoch of courtiers intoxicated with pa.s.sion and consumed by vice, infatuated with the king and his mistress, whose t.i.tle as _maitresse-en-t.i.tre_ was considered an official one, conferring the same privileges and demanding the same ceremonies and etiquette as did a high court position. The only opposition incurred was from the clergy, who eventually, by uniting their forces with the influence of Mme. de Maintenon, brought about the disgrace of the mistress.
When, in 1675, she desired to perform her Easter duties publicly at Versailles, the priest refused to grant absolution until she should discontinue her wanton, adulterous life. She appealed to the king, and he referred the decision of the matter to Bossuet, who decided that it was an imperative duty to deny absolution to public sinners of notorious lives who refused to abandon them. This was immediately before her legal separation from her husband.
Influenced by the preaching of men like Bourdaloue and Bossuet, the king resolved to abandon his powerful mistress; in 1686 she was finally separated from Louis XIV., but did not leave Versailles until 1691, when, becoming reconciled to her fate, she decided to retire to a convent. Bossuet became her spiritual adviser, and described her habits in the following letter to the king:
”I find Mme. de Montespan sufficiently tranquil. She occupies herself greatly in good works. I see her much affected by the verities I propose to her, which are the same I uttered to your majesty. To her--as to you--I have offered the words by which G.o.d commands us to yield our whole hearts to him; they have caused her to shed many tears. May G.o.d establish these verities in the depths of the hearts of both of you, in order that so many tears, so much suffering, so many efforts as you have made to subdue yourselves, may not be in vain.”
The king did not wholly abandon his mistress; from a material point of view, she was more powerful than ever, for Louis XIV. gave orders to his minister, Colbert, to do for Mme. de Montespan whatever she wished, and her wishes caused a heavy drain upon the treasury. The king continued to pay court to other favorites, such as the Princesse de Soubese and Mlle. de Fontanges; the latter was his third mistress, but her career was of short duration, as one of the last acts of Mme.
de Montespan was, it is said, the poisoning of Mlle. de Fontanges; this, however, is not generally accepted as true, although the Princesse Palatine wrote the following which throws suspicion upon the former favorite: ”Mme. de Montespan was a fiend incarnate, but the Fontanges was good and simple. The latter is dead--because, they say, the former put poison in her milk. I do not know whether or not this is true, but what I do know well is that two of the Fontanges's people died, saying publicly that they had been poisoned.” With the increasing influence of Mme. de Maintenon, the king completely forgot his former mistress.
Mme. de Montespan was possibly the most arrogant and despotic of all French mistresses and she was, also, the most humiliated. She had inspired no confidence, friends.h.i.+p, love, or respect in Louis XIV., who eventually looked with shame and remorse upon his relations with her. It took her sixteen years to overcome her terrible pa.s.sion and to give up the court forever. Not until 1691 did she become reconciled to departure from Versailles; thenceforth, penitence conquered immoral desires. M. Saint-Amand says she not only ”arrived at remorse, but at macerations, fasts, and haircloths. She limited herself to the coa.r.s.est underlinen and wore a belt and garters studded with iron points. She came at last to give all she had to the poor;” she also founded a hospital in which she nursed the sick.
While at the convent, she tried, in vain, to effect a reconciliation with her husband; not until every avenue to a social life was cut off from her, did she entirely surrender herself to charity and the service of G.o.d. In her latest years, she was so tormented by the horrors of death that she employed several women whose only occupation was to watch with her at night. She died in 1707, forgotten by the king and all her former a.s.sociates; Louis XIV. formally prohibited her children, the Duke of Maine, the Comte de Toulouse, the Comte de Vexin, and Mlles. de Nantes, de Blois, and de Tours, from wearing mourning for her.
A striking contrast to Mme. de Montespan in character, disposition, morality, and birth was Mme. de Maintenon, one of the greatest and most important women in French history. What is known of her is so enveloped in calumny and falsehood and made so uncertain by dispute, that to disentangle the actual facts is almost an impossibility, despite the glowing tribute paid to her in the immense work published recently by the Comte d'Haussonville and M. Gabriel Hanotaux.
It would seem that the more the history of Mme. de Maintenon is studied, the more one is led away from a first impression--which usually proves to be an erroneous one. Thus, M. Lavallee, in his first work, _Histoire des Francais_, wrote that she ”was of the most complete aridity of heart, narrow in the scope of her affections, and meanly intriguing. She suggested fatal enterprises and inappropriate appointments; she forced mediocre and servile persons upon the king; she had, in fine, the major share in the errors and disasters of the reign of Louis XIV.” A few years later he wrote, in his _Histoire de la maison royale de Saint-Cyr_: ”Mme. de Maintenon gave Louis XIV.
none but salutary and disinterested counsels which were useful to the state and instrumental in making less heavy the burdens of the people.”
Opinion in general, especially French opinion, has been very bitter toward her. History has even reproached her with having been a usurper, a tyrant, and a selfish master. The great preacher, Fenelon, wrote to her:
”They say you take too little part in affairs. Your mind is more capable than you think. You are, perhaps, a little too distrustful of yourself, or, rather, you are too much afraid to enter into discussions contrary to the inclination you have for a tranquil and meditative life.”
Is this picture, left by Emile Chasles and accepted by M. Saint-Amand, truthful? ”This intelligent woman, far from being too much heeded, was not enough so. There was in her a veritable love for the public welfare, a true sorrow in the midst of our misfortunes. To-day, it is necessary to retrench much from the grandeur of her worldly power and add a great deal to that of her soul.” M. Saint-Amand believes her sincere when she wrote to Mme. des Ursins:
”In whatever way matters turn, I conjure you, madame, to regard me as a person incapable of directing affairs, who heard them talked too late to be skilful in them, and who hates them more than she ignores them.... My interference in them is not desired and I do not desire to interfere. They are not concealed from me, but I know nothing consecutively and am often badly informed.”
The opinions of her contemporaries are not always flattering, but such are possibly due to envy and jealousy or to some purely personal prejudice. Thus, when the d.u.c.h.ess of Orleans, the Princesse Palatine, calls her ”that nasty old thing, that wicked devil, that shrivelled-up, filthy old Maintenon, that concubine of the king,” and casts upon her other gross aspersions that are unfit to be repeated, one must remember that the calumniator was a German, the daughter of the Elector Palatine Charles-Louis, a woman honest in her morals, but shameless in her speech, who loved the beauties of nature more than those of the palaces; more shocked at hypocrites than at religion or irreligion, she took Mme. de Maintenon to be a type of the impostors whom she detested. It was her son who became regent, and it was her son who married one of the illegitimate daughters of Louis XIV.--an alliance of which his mother had a horror.
The memoirs of Saint-Simon are interesting, but the odious picture he has drawn of Mme. de Maintenon is hardly in accord with later appreciations. M. Saint-Amand sums up the two cla.s.ses of critics thus:
”The revolutionary school which likes to drag the memory of the great king through the mire, naturally detests the eminent woman who was that king's companion, his friend and consoler. Writers of this school would like to make of her a type not only odious and fatal, but ungraceful and unsympathetic, without radiance, charm or any sort of fascination. She is too frequently called to mind under the aspect of a worn old woman, stiff and severe, with tearless eyes and a face without a smile. We forget that in her youth she was one of the prettiest women of her time, that her beauty was wonderfully preserved, and that in her old age she retained that superiority of style and language, that distinction of manner and exquisite tact, that gentle firmness of character, that charm and elevation of mind, which, at every period of her life, gained her so much praise and so many friends.”
Mme. de Maintenon was born in prison. Her maiden name was Francoise d'Aubigne. She was the granddaughter of Agrippa d'Aubigne, the historian. Her father had planned to settle in the Carolinas, and his correspondence with the English government, to that effect, was treated as treason; he was thrown into prison, where his wife voluntarily shared his fate and where the future Mme. de Maintenon was born. After the death of her father, she was confided to her aunt, Mme. de Villette, a Calvinist, who trained her in the principles of Protestantism. Because of the refusal of her daughter to attend ma.s.s, her mother put her in charge of the Countess of Neuillant who, with great difficulty, converted Francoise back to Catholicism.
At the home of the Countess of Neuillant, she often met Scarron, the comic poet--a paralytic and cripple--who offered her money with which to pay for admission to a convent, a proposition which she refused; subsequently, however, the countess sent her to the Ursulines to be educated. When, after two years, she lost her mother and was thus left without home, fortune, or future prospects, she consented, at the age of seventeen, to marry the poet. Thus, born in a prison, without even a dowry, harshly reared by a mother who was under few obligations to life, more harshly treated in the convent, introduced as a poor relation into the society of her aunt and to the friends of her G.o.dmother, the Countess of Neuillant, she early learned to distrust life and suspect man, and to restrain her ambitions.
<script>