The Correspondence of Madame, Princess Palatine, Mother of the Regent; of Marie-Adélaïde de Savoie, Duchesse de Bourgogne; and of Madame de Maintenon, in Relation to Saint-Cyr
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Title: The Correspondence of Madame, Princess Palatine, Mother of the Regent; of Marie-Adélaïde de Savoie, Duchesse de Bourgogne; and of Madame de Maintenon, in Relation to Saint-Cyr
Editor: Katharine Prescott Wormeley
Author: Madame de Maintenon
Duchess of Burgundy of Savoy Marie Adelaide
duchesse d' Charlotte-Elisabeth Orléans
Commentator: Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve
Release date: July 23, 2013 [eBook #43283]
Most recently updated: October 23, 2024
Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CORRESPONDENCE OF MADAME, PRINCESS PALATINE, MOTHER OF THE REGENT; OF MARIE-ADÉLAÏDE DE SAVOIE, DUCHESSE DE BOURGOGNE; AND OF MADAME DE MAINTENON, IN RELATION TO SAINT-CYR ***
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THE CORRESPONDENCE OF MADAME PRINCESS PALATINE,
MARIE-ADÉLAÏDE DE SAVOIE,
AND
MADAME DE MAINTENON.
Versailles Edition
_Limited to Eight Hundred Numbered Sets, of which
this is_
_No._ ----
[Illustration: "_Madame_"]
THE CORRESPONDENCE OF MADAME, PRINCESS PALATINE, _MOTHER OF THE REGENT_;
OF
MARIE-ADÉLAÏDE DE SAVOIE, _DUCHESSE DE BOURGOGNE_;
AND OF
MADAME DE MAINTENON,
_IN RELATION TO SAINT-CYR_.
Preceded by Introductions from C.-A. Sainte-Beuve.
Selected and Translated by Katharine Prescott Wormeley.
Boston:
Hardy, Pratt & Company.
1899.
Copyright, 1899,
By Hardy, Pratt & Company.
All rights reserved.
University Press:
John Wilson and Son, Cambridge, U.S.A.
CONTENTS.
PAGE
INTRODUCTION BY C.-A. SAINTE-BEUVE 1
TRANSLATOR'S NOTE 35
CORRESPONDENCE OF MADAME:
I. LETTERS OF 1695-1714 39
II. LETTERS OF 1714-1716 64
III. LETTERS OF 1717-1718 94
IV. LETTERS OF 1718-1719 124
V. LETTERS OF 1720-1722 153
CORRESPONDENCE OF MARIE-ADÉLAÏDE DE SAVOIE:
VI. LETTERS OF THE DUCHESSE DE BOURGOGNE 182
CORRESPONDENCE OF MADAME DE MAINTENON:
VII. MME. DE MAINTENON AND SAINT-CYR 216
VIII. LETTERS TO THE DAMES DE SAINT-CYR AND
OTHERS 236
IX. CONVERSATIONS AND INSTRUCTIONS OF MME. DE
MAINTENON AT SAINT-CYR 268
X. MME. DE MAINTENON'S DESCRIPTION OF HER LIFE
AT COURT; WITH A FEW MISCELLANEOUS LETTERS 300
INDEX 323
LIST OF PHOTOGRAVURE ILLUSTRATIONS.
MADAME, ÉLISABETH-CHARLOTTE, PRINCESS PALATINE, DUCHESSE
D'ORLÉANS _Frontispiece_
By Rigaud (Hyacinthe); in the Brunswick gallery. This is the
picture Madame mentions in her letters; this reproduction is from
the copy which she promised to send to her sister Louise, Countess
Palatine; the original portrait is at Versailles.
CHAPTER _Page_
I. SAINT-CLOUD, CHÂTEAU AND PARK OF 42
From a photograph by Neurdin, Paris.
II. FONTAINEBLEAU. LOUIS XIV. AND ESCORT, HUNTING 64
By Van der Meulen (Adam Franz); painted by order of the king;
in the Louvre.
III. MARIE-ANNE-VICTOIRE DE BAVIÈRE, DAUPHINE, WIFE OF
MONSEIGNEUR, WITH HER SONS 96
The Duc de Bourgogne carries a lance; the Duc d'Anjou (Philippe
V.) holds a dog; the Duc de Berry is on his mother's lap; by
Mignard (Pierre); in the Louvre.
IV. LOUISE DE BOURBON, "MME. LA DUCHESSE" 124
By Largillière (Nicolas de); Versailles.
V. MARIE-THÉRÈSE, INFANTA OF SPAIN, WIFE OF LOUIS XIV. 154
By Velasquez (Diego Rodriguez da Silva y); in the Prado
gallery, Madrid.
V. RENÉ DESCARTES 168
By Franz Halz; in the Louvre.
VI. MARIE ADÉLAÏDE DE SAVOIE, DUCHESSE DE BOURGOGNE 182
Painter's name not obtained; probably Santerre; in the Royal
palace at Turin; photographed by permission from the original
for this edition.
VII. MADAME DE MAINTENON 216
Head of the portrait painted for Saint-Cyr by Mignard; now in
the Louvre.
X. LOUIS XIV. AT MARLY 300
By Geuslain (Charles); Versailles.
CORRESPONDENCE OF MADAME,
ÉLISABETH-CHARLOTTE, PRINCESS PALATINE,
MOTHER OF THE REGENT.
INTRODUCTION BY C.-A. SAINTE-BEUVE.
"I am very frank and very natural, and I say all that I have in
my heart." That is the motto that ought to be placed upon the
correspondence of Madame, which was chiefly written in German and
published from time to time in voluminous extracts at Strasburg and
beyond the Rhine. This correspondence, translated by fragments,
was made into a volume and called, very improperly, the "Memoirs
of Madame." Coming after other memoirs of the celebrated women of
the great century, it ran singularly counter to them in tone, and
caused great surprise. Now that the Memoirs of Saint-Simon have been
published in full, I will not say that the pages of the chronicle we
owe to Madame have paled, but they have ceased to astonish. They are
now recognized as good, naïve pictures, somewhat forced in colour,
rather coarse in feature, exaggerated and grimacing at times, but on
the whole good likenesses. The right method for judging of Madame's
correspondence, and thus of gaining insight to the history of that
period, is to see how Madame wrote, and in what spirit; also what she
herself was by nature and by education. For this purpose the letters
published by M. Menzel in German, and translated by M. Brunet, are
of great assistance to a knowledge of this singular and original
personage; to understand her properly it is not too much to say that
Germany and France must be combined.
Élisabeth-Charlotte, who married in 1671 Monsieur, brother of Louis
XIV., was born at Heidelberg in 1652. Her father, Charles-Louis, was
that Elector of the Palatinate who was restored to his States by the
Peace of Westphalia. From childhood Élisabeth-Charlotte was noted
for her lively mind, and her frank, open, vigorous nature. Domestic
peace had never reigned about the hearth of the Elector-Palatine; he
had a mistress, whom he married by the left hand, and the mother of
Élisabeth-Charlotte is accused of having caused the separation by
her crabbed temper. The young girl was confided to the care of her
aunt Sophia, Electress of Hanover, a person of merit, for whom she
always retained the feelings and gratitude of a loving daughter. To
her she addressed her longest and most confidential letters, which
would certainly surpass in interest those that are published, but M.
Menzel states that it is not known what became of them. All that part
of the life and youth of Madame would be curious and very useful to
recover. "I was too old," she says, "when I came to France to change
my character; the foundations were laid." While subjecting herself
with courage and resolution to the duties of her new position she kept
her German tastes; she confesses them and proclaims them before all
Versailles and all Marly; and the Court, then the arbiter of Europe,
to which it set the tone, would certainly have been shocked if it had
not preferred to smile.
From Marly after forty-three years' residence in France, Madame writes
(November 22, 1714): "I cannot endure coffee, chocolate, or tea,
and I do not understand how any one can like them; a good dish of
sauerkraut and smoked sausages is, to my mind, a feast for a king,
to which nothing is preferable; cabbage soup with lard suits me much
better than all the delicacies they dote on here." In the commonest
and most every-day things she finds another and a poorer taste than
in Germany. "The butter and milk," she says, after fifty years'
residence, "are not as good as ours; they have no flavour and taste
like water. The cabbages are not good either, for the soil is not
rich, but light and sandy, so that vegetables have no strength and the
cows cannot give good milk. _Mon Dieu!_ how I should like to eat the
dishes your cook prepares for you; they would be more to my taste than
those my _maître-d'hôtel_ serves up to me."
But she clung to her own country, her German stock, her "Rhin
allemand," by other memories than those of food and the national
cooking. She loved nature, the country, a free life, even a wild
one; the impressions of her childhood returned to her in whiffs of
freshness. Apropos of Heidelberg, rebuilt after the disasters, and
of a convent of Jesuits, or Franciscans, established on the heights,
"_Mon Dieu!_" she cries, "how many times I have eaten cherries on that
mountain, with a good bit of bread, at five in the morning! I was
gayer then than I am to-day." The brisk air of Heidelberg is with her
after fifty years' absence; and she speaks of it a few months before
her death to the half-sister Louise, to whom she writes: "There is
not in all the world a better air than that of Heidelberg; above all,
about the château where my apartment is; nothing better can be found."
In Germany, on the banks of the Neckar and the Rhine,
Élisabeth-Charlotte enjoyed the picturesque sites, her rambles
through the forests, Nature left to herself, and also the spots of
bourgeois plenty amid the wilder environment. "I love trees and
fields more than the finest palaces; I like a kitchen garden better
than a garden with statues and fountains; a brook pleases me a great
deal more than sumptuous cascades; in a word, all that is natural is
infinitely more to my taste than works of art or magnificence; the
latter only please at first sight; as soon as one is accustomed to
them they fatigue, and we care no more about them." In France she
was particularly fond of residing at Saint-Cloud, where she enjoyed
Nature with greater liberty. At Fontainebleau she often walked out on
foot and went a league through the forest. On her arrival in France
and first appearance at Court, she told her physician when presented
to her that "she did not need him; she had never been bled or purged,
and when she did not feel well she always walked six miles on foot,
which cured her." Mme. de Sévigné who relates this, seems to conclude,
with the majority of the Court, that the new Madame was overcome with
her grandeur and spoke like a person who is not accustomed to such
surroundings. Mme. de Sévigné is mistaken; Madame was in no degree
overcome by her greatness. She felt herself born for the high rank
of Monsieur's wife, and would have felt in her right place if higher
still. But Mme. de Sévigné though she herself walked with pleasure in
her woods at Livry and her park des Rochers, did not divine the proud
young girl, so brusque and wild, who ate with delight her bit of bread
and cherries plucked from the trees at five in the morning on the
hills of Heidelberg.
Madame's marriage was not made to please her. In France this has been
concealed; in Germany it was said quite plainly. Her father, the
Elector, hoped by this alliance to buy the safety of his dominions,
always threatened by the French. Like a pious daughter she obeyed; but
she could not refrain from saying: "I am the political lamb, about to
be sacrificed for my country." The _lamb_, after we once know her,
seems a singular term to choose for so vigorous a victim; but the
comparison is just, all the same, so tender and good was the heart
within her.
The rôle that Madame conceived for herself in France was that of
preserving her native country from the horrors of war, and of being
useful to it in the different schemes which agitated the Court of
France and might in the end overthrow it. In this she failed; and the
failure was to her a poignant grief. She was even made the innocent
cause of fresh disasters to the land she loved when, on the death of
her father and her brother (who left no children), Louis XIV. set up
a claim to the Palatinate on her account. Instead of bringing pledges
and guarantees of peace, she found herself a pretext and a means for
war. The devastation and the too famous incendiarism of the Palatinate
which the struggles of ambition brought about caused her inexpressible
grief. "When I think of those flames, shudders run over me. Every
time I try to go to sleep I see Heidelberg on fire, and I start up
in bed, so that I am almost ill in consequence." She speaks of this
incessantly, and bleeds and weeps for it after many years. For Louvois
she retained an eternal hatred. "I suffer bitter pain," she writes
thirty years later (November 3, 1718), "when I think of all that M. de
Louvois burned up in the Palatinate; I believe he is burning terribly
in the other world, for he died so suddenly he had no time to repent."
Madame's virtue in this and other conjunctures was in being faithful
to France and to Louis XIV., all the while torn by distress within
her secret self. She never ceases to interest herself in the fate of
her unhappy country, and in its resurrection after so many disasters.
"I love that prince," she said of the Elector of another branch which
was reigning in 1718, "because he loves the Palatinate. I can easily
imagine how pained he was when he saw how little remained in the ruins
of Heidelberg; the tears come into my eyes when I think of it, and I
am so sad." Nevertheless, she regrets the religious bickerings and
persecutions introduced into the country, and her own powerlessness
to intervene for the protection of those who are persecuted. "I see
but too plainly now," she writes in 1719, "that God did not will that
I should accomplish any good in France, for, in spite of my efforts,
I have never been able to be useful to my native country. It is true
that when I came to France it was purely in obedience to my father, my
uncle, and my aunt, the Electress of Hanover; my inclination did in
nowise bring me here." Thus, in the marriage, apparently so brilliant,
which she contracted with the brother of Louis XIV. Madame cared for
one thing only, namely, to serve and protect her German land from
French policy; and on that very side where politics (to which she was
always a stranger) touched her most, she had the grief of failing.
When the marriage of Élisabeth-Charlotte was negotiated, it became a
question of converting her. The erudite and witty Chévreau, who was
at the Court of the Elector Palatine in the capacity of councillor,
flattered himself that he contributed to that result by daily
interviews with her of four hours in length for three weeks. One of
the orators who eulogized Madame at the time of her death, her almoner
(the Abbé de Saint-Géri de Magnas), said as to this: "When asked in
marriage for Monsieur by Louis XIV. the principal condition was that
she should embrace the Catholic religion. Neither ambition nor levity
had any share in this change; the respect and tenderness she felt for
Mme. la Princesse Palatine, her aunt, who was Catholic, prevented
her from refusing to be instructed. She listened to Père Jourdain, a
Jesuit. Born with the rectitude which distinguished her all her life,
she did not resist the truth. Her abjuration was made at Metz."
Madame was, in truth, perfectly sincere in her conversion;
nevertheless, she carried into it something of her freedom of mind
and her independence of temper. "On my arrival in France," she says,
"they made me hold conferences about religion with three bishops. All
three differed in their beliefs; I took the quintessence of their
opinions and formed my own." In this catholic religion, thus defined
in the rough, which she believed and practised in perfect good faith,
there remained traces and several of the habits of her early faith.
She continued to read the Bible in German. She mentions that at that
period in France scarcely any one, even among the devout, read Holy
Scripture. The translations recently made of it had led to such
discussions and bitter quarrels that the ecclesiastical authority
intervened and forbade the reading of them; which has ever since
remained a rarity in our country. Madame was therefore a notable
exception when, in her plan of life, she gave a great and regular
place to meditation on the Holy Book. She selected three days in the
week for that salutary practice. "After my son's visit," she writes
(November, 1717), "I sat down to table, and after dinner I took my
Bible and read four chapters of the book of Job, four Psalms, and two
chapters of Saint John, leaving the other two till this morning." And
she might have written the same thing on each of her appointed days.
On one occasion she was singing unconsciously the Calvinist psalms, or
the Lutheran canticles (for she mixed them up), while walking alone
in the Orangery at Versailles, when a painter who was at work on a
scaffolding came down hurriedly and threw himself at her feet, saying
with gratitude: "Is it possible, Madame, that you still remember our
Psalms?" The painter was a reformer and afterwards a refugee; she
relates the little story very touchingly.
She had nothing of the sectarian spirit. She blamed Luther for
wishing to make a separate Church; he ought to have confined himself,
she thought, to attacking abuses. She retained from him and from
other reformers, in spite of her conversion, a habit of invective
against religious Orders of all kinds; and on this subject she
bursts into tirades which are less those of a woman than of a pedant
of the sixteenth century or some doctor emancipated from the rue
Saint-Jacques. Gui Patin in a farthingale could not have expressed
himself differently. She corresponded with Leibnitz, who assured her
that she wrote German "not badly;" which pleased her much, for she
could not endure, she says, to see Germans despising and ignoring
their mother tongue. The letters that she wrote to Leibnitz would
be precious could they some day be recovered and published. She may
have gladly borrowed from that illustrious philosopher his idea of
an approach and fusion, a reconciliation, in short, between the
principal Christian communities, for she renders it, rather brusquely
as her manner was, when she says: "If they followed my advice all
the sovereigns would give orders that among all Christians, without
distinction of beliefs, people were to abstain from insulting
expressions, and that each and all were to believe and practise as
they saw fit." In the midst of that Court of Louis XIV., which was so
unanimous as to the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, she retained
the most inviolable ideas of tolerance. "It is not showing themselves
in any way Christian," she said, "to torture people for religious
reasons, and I think it monstrous; but when one examines things to
the bottom we find that religion is only a pretext; all is done from
policy and selfish interests. They are serving Mammon, and not God."
Later, she humanely intercedes with her son, the regent, to release
from the galleys the Reformers who had been sent there. But as it is
in Madame's temperament to exaggerate everything, even her own good
qualities, and to introduce a sort of incoherence into her efforts,
she goes far beyond her object when she expresses the wish that she
may see in the galleys, in the place of such poor innocents, those who
she thinks have persecuted them, and also other monks, especially the
Spanish monks, who resisted to the last in Barcelona the accession of
Louis XIV.'s grandson. "They preached in all the streets that no one
should surrender; and if I had my way those rascals would have gone
to the galleys in place of the poor Reformers who are languishing
there." That is Madame--in all her goodness of heart, extravagance of
language, and her frank, sincere religion of a mixed nature.
When she arrived in France at the age of nineteen no one expected all
this. The Court was filled with memories and regrets for the late
Madame, the amiable Henrietta, snatched away in the bloom of her charm
and grace. "Alas!" cries Mme. de Sévigné, speaking of the new-comer,
"alas! if _this_ Madame could only represent to us her whom we have
lost!" In place of a blithesome fairy and a being of enchantment, what
was it that suddenly appeared before them?
"Madame," says Saint-Simon, "was a princess of the olden time;
attached to honour, virtue, rank, grandeur, and inexorable as to their
observances. She was not without intellect; and what she saw she saw
very well. A good and faithful friend, trusty, true, and upright; easy
to prejudice and shock; very difficult to bring back from prejudice;
coarse, and dangerous in her public outbursts; very German in her
habits; frank, indifferent to all propriety and all delicacy for
herself and for others; sober, solitary, and full of notions. She
loved dogs and horses, hunting and theatres passionately, and was
never seen except in full dress or in a man's wig and riding-habit."
He concludes his portrait admirably in these words: "The figure and
rusticity of a Swiss, but capable withal of a tender and inviolable
friendship."
Introduced at Court by her aunt, the illustrious Princess Palatine,
Anne of Gonzaga, in nothing was she in keeping with it,--neither in
spirit, nor in the gifts of insinuation and conciliatory conduct, nor
in caution. Succeeding the first Madame, she seemed even farther aloof
from it, more completely a contrast in manners, in the quality and
turn of her thoughts, in delicacy, in short, in everything. Madame,
throughout her life, was, and must necessarily have been, the contrary
of many things and many persons about her; she was original, at any
rate, and in all ways Herself.
It seems an irony of fate that gave as second wife to Monsieur, that
prince so weak and so effeminate, a woman who in tastes was far more
like a man, and who always regretted she was not born a boy. Madame
gayly relates how, in her youth, feeling her vocation as a cavalier
very strongly, she was always expecting some miracle of Nature in
her favour. With this idea she devoted herself as much as she could
to all manly exercises and perilous leaping. She cared much more for
swords and guns than for dolls. But above all she proves how little
of a woman's nature was in her by the want of delicacy, or, to speak
plainly, the lack of modesty in what she says. She is honesty itself,
virtue, fidelity, honour; but also, at times, indecency and coarseness
personified. She speaks of everything indiscriminately, like a man, is
never disgusted by any language, and never goes by four roads when
she has to express something which would be difficult and embarrassing
to any one but herself. Contrary to the nature of women, she has no
desire to please, and no coquetry. Being asked one day why she never
glanced into a mirror in passing it, "Because," she replied, "I have
too much self-love to like to see how ugly I am." The fine portrait by
Rigaud gives us a perfect likeness of her in her old age, portly, fat,
a double chin and red cheeks, with dignity of carriage nevertheless,
and a proud bearing, but an expression of kindness in the eyes and
smile.[1] She herself was pleased at times to record her ugliness; one
might even suppose that she valued it.
"It is no matter whether one is handsome or not; a fine face changes
soon, but a good conscience is always good. You must remember very
little of me if you do not rank me among the ugly ones; I have always
been so, and I am more so now because of the small-pox. My waist is
monstrous in size; I am as square as a cube; my skin is red, mottled
with yellow; my hair is getting gray; my nose is honeycombed with the
small-pox, and so are my cheeks; I have a large mouth and bad teeth;
and there's the portrait of my pretty face."
Certainly no one was ever ugly with more spirit and light-heartedness.
Occasionally there slips in beneath Madame's pen and her expressions
a natural vein of Rabelais and the grotesque. She fills in that way a
unique corner in the Court of Louis XIV. Knowing well what was due to
her rank and never departing from it, there are many occasions when
she is incongruous with it and violates decorum.
It was perhaps by this naïve brusqueness, and also by her solid
qualities as an honest woman (I was going to say an honest man),
that she pleased Louis XIV., so that between herself and him there
was formed a friendship which was not without its singularity, and
which at first sight seems surprising. Mme. de Sévigné, in a letter
to her daughter, seems to think that Madame felt for Louis XIV. (as
the preceding Madame had done) an inclination that was more or less
romantic, and which affected her without her admitting to herself
exactly what it was. There is a little too much that is far-fetched
in all this. In general, as I have already remarked, Mme. de Sévigné
understands Madame very little, and does not give herself the trouble
to seek the meaning of a nature so little French. When she hears that
the princess fainted with grief at the sudden news of the death of her
father, the Elector Palatine, Mme. de Sévigné jests about it thus: "On
this, Madame began to cry and weep and make a strange noise; they said
she fainted, but I do not believe it; she seems to me incapable of
that sign of weakness. All that death could do would be to sober her
spirits,"--_fixer ses esprits_, because _ses esprits_ (in the language
of the physics of the day) were always in movement and great agitation.
But let us leave for a moment such French pleasantry and this facility
for trifling with everything and over-refining all things. Madame,
married in so sad and hapless a manner, and with whom one had only to
talk, it was said, to be disgusted at once with the painful conditions
of marriage,--Madame was not the woman to fall back upon romance to
console her for reality. Thrown into the midst of a brilliant but
false Court, full at that time of gallantry and pleasures which merely
covered ambitions and rivalries, she distinguished with an instinct of
good sense and a certain pride of race the person to whom she could
attach herself in the midst of all these people, and she turned with
her natural uprightness to the most honest man among them, namely, to
Louis XIV. himself. A Jesuit, who pronounced a funeral oration over
Madame, Père Cathalan, has said on this subject all that was best to
say. In the kingdom at that time was a king who was worthy of being
one; with the good qualities we know well, combined with defects which
every one about him sought to favour and encourage; a king who was
essentially a man of merit, "always master and always king, but more
of an honest man and Christian than he was master or king."
"It was this merit that touched her," says Père Cathalan, very truly.
"A taste for, and, if I may so express myself, a sympathy of greatness
attached Madame to Louis XIV. Inward affinities make noble attachments
of esteem and respect; and great souls, though the features of their
greatness may differ, feel, and resemble one another. She esteemed,
she honoured, shall I venture to say she loved that great king because
she was great herself. She loved him when he was greater than his
fortunes; she loved him still more when he was greater than his
sorrows. We saw her giving to the dying monarch her bitter tears,
giving them again to his memory, seeking him in that superb palace so
filled with his presence and his virtues, saying often how she missed
him, and feeling always the wound of his death,--a sentiment which the
glory of her son, the regent, could never take away."
Madame was agreeable to Louis XIV. by her frankness, her open nature;
she amused him with her repartees and her lively talk; she made him
laugh with all his heart, for (a rare thing at Courts) she liked
joy for joy's sake. "Joy is very good for the health," thought she;
"the silliest thing is to be sad." She broke the monotony of Court
ceremony, the long silent meals, the slow minuets of all kinds. What
would have been incongruous in others had a certain spice in her; she
had her privileges. "When the king dislikes to say a thing directly
to any one, he addresses his speech to me; he knows very well that I
don't constrain myself in conversation, and that diverts him. At table
he is obliged to talk with me because nobody else will say a word."
She was not so inferior to the king as might be thought; or rather she
was not inferior to him at all except in politeness, in moderation, in
the spirit of consistency and sobriety. In certain respects she judged
him with much intelligence, and with freer and broader good sense than
he was capable of himself; she thought him ignorant in many ways, and
she was right. What she valued most in him was his uprightness of
feeling, and the accuracy of his _coup-d'oeil_ when left to himself;
also the quality of his mind, the charm of his intercourse, the
excellent expression of his thoughts,--it was, in short, a certain
loftiness of nature which attracted and charmed her in Louis XIV. She
aided more than any other in consoling him and diverting his mind
after the death of the Duchesse de Bourgogne; she went to him every
evening at the permitted hour, and she saw that he was pleased with
her company. "There is no one but Madame who does not leave me now,"
said Louis XIV. "I see that she is glad to be with me." Madame has
ingenuously expressed the sort of open and sincere affection that
she felt for Louis XIV. by saying: "If the king had been my father I
could not have loved him more than I did love him, and I had pleasure
in being with him." When the king's health declined and he neared
his last hour, we find Madame laying bare her grief in her letters;
she, whose son was about to become regent, she dreads more than any
one the change of reign. "The king is not well," she says, August
15, 1715, "and it troubles me to the point of being half ill myself;
I have lost both sleep and appetite. God grant I may be mistaken!
but if what I fear should happen it would be for me the greatest of
misfortunes." She relates the last scenes of farewell with true and
visible emotion. The little good that has been done in the final years
of that long reign she attributes to Louis XIV.; and all that was bad
she imputes to her whom she considers an evil genius and the devil
personified,--to Mme. de Maintenon.
And here we come to Madame's great antipathy, to what in her is almost
unimaginable prejudice, hatred, and animosity so violent that they
become at times comical. And truly, if Madame at a given moment had
really been in love with Louis XIV., and if she had hated in Mme. de
Maintenon the rival who supplanted her, she could not have expressed
herself otherwise. But there is no need of that sort of explanation
for a nature so easy to prejudice, so difficult to placate, and so
wholly in opposition and contrast to the point of departure and
proceedings of Mme. de Maintenon. Hers were antipathies of race, of
condition, of temperament, which long years passed in the presence,
the continual sight, the rigid restraint of their object only
cultivated, secretly fomented, and exasperated. Who has not seen such
long-suppressed enmities which explode when an opening is made for
them?
Madame, pre-eminently princess of a sovereign house, who never,
with all her natural human qualities and her free and easy ways,
forgot the duties of birth and grandeur, she of whom it was said,
"No great personage ever knew her rights better or made them
better felt by others,"--Madame held nothing in so much horror and
contempt as misalliances. The gallery at Versailles long echoed
with the resounding blow she applied to her son on the day when,
having consented to marry the natural daughter of Louis XIV., he
approached his mother according to custom, to kiss her hand. Now of
all misalliances what could be greater or more inexcusable to her eyes
than that which placed Mme. de Maintenon beside Louis XIV.?
Madame, natural, frank, letting her feelings willingly escape her,
liking to pour them out, often in excess beyond themselves and
observing no caution, could not away with the cold procedure, prudent,
cautious, mysterious, polite, and unassailable, of a person to whom
she attributed a thousand schemes blacker and deeper than those of
hell.
She disliked her for little things and disliked her for great ones.
She supposed that it was Mme. de Maintenon who, in concert with Père
de La Chaise, had plotted and carried through the persecution of the
Reformers; in this she was not only human, but she found herself
once more a little of a Calvinist or a Lutheran with a touch of the
old leaven; she thought close at hand what the refugees in Holland
were writing from afar. She believed she saw in Mme. de Maintenon
a Tartuffe in a sage-coloured gown. And besides--another grievance
almost as serious!--if there was no longer any etiquette at Court, if
ranks were no longer preserved and defined, Mme. de Maintenon was the
cause of it.
"There is no longer a Court in France," she writes, "and it is the
fault of the Maintenon, who, finding that the king would not declare
her queen, was determined there should be no more great functions, and
has persuaded the young dauphine [the Duchesse de Bourgogne] to stay
in her, Mme. de Maintenon's rooms, where there is no distinction of
rank or dignity. Under pretext of its being a game, the old woman has
induced the dauphine and the princesses to wait upon her at her toilet
and meals; she has even persuaded them to hand her the dishes, change
her plates, and pour what she drank. Everything is topsy-turvy, and
none of them know their right place nor what they are. I have never
mixed myself up in all that: when I go to see the lady I place myself
close to her niche in an armchair, and I never help her either at
her meals or her toilet. Some persons have advised me to do as the
dauphine and the princesses do, but I answer: 'I was never brought up
to do servile things, and I am too old to play childish games.' Since
then no one has said anything more about it."
I should never end if I enumerated all the reasons by which Madame
brought herself, gradually and insensibly, to a species of mania which
seizes her whenever she has to speak of Mme. de Maintenon, for there
are no terms that she does not employ about her. On this subject she
drops into whatever the grossest popular credulity could imagine in
its days of madness; she sees in Mme. de Maintenon, even after the
death of Louis XIV. and while buried at Saint-Cyr, a monopolist of
wheat, a poisoner expert in the art of a Brinvilliers, a Gorgon, an
incendiary who sets fire to the château de Lunéville. And after she
has exhausted everything, she adds: "All the evil that has been said
of this diabolical woman is still below the truth." She applies to her
an old German proverb: "Where the devil can't go himself he sends an
old woman." Saint-Simon, inflamed as he is, pales beside this fabulous
hatred, and has himself told us the secret of it.
One day, on a memorable occasion, Madame found herself humiliated
before Mme. de Maintenon, forced to admit a wrong she had done her,
to make her excuses before witnesses, and to say she was gratefully
obliged to her. This happened on the death of Monsieur (June, 1701).
Madame, who at that serious crisis had everything to obtain from
the king both for herself and for her son (and did in fact obtain
it), made the effort to lay her dignity aside and address herself
to Mme. de Maintenon. The latter went to see her, and in presence
of the Duchesse de Ventadour as witness, she represented to Madame,
after listening to her, that the king had much reason to complain of
her, but was willing to overlook it all. Madame, believing herself
quite safe, protested her innocence; Mme. de Maintenon, with great
self-possession, allowed her to speak to the end, and then drew
from her pocket a letter, such as Madame wrote daily to her aunt
the Electress of Hanover, in which she spoke in the most outrageous
terms of the relations between the king and Mme. de Maintenon. We can
imagine that Madame, at the sight, nearly died upon the spot.
When the name of the king was laid aside Mme. de Maintenon began
to speak on her own account, and to answer Madame's reproaches for
having changed in her sentiments towards her. After allowing Madame,
as before, to say all that she had to say and to commit herself to
a certain extent, she suddenly quoted to her certain secret words
particularly offensive to herself, which she had known and kept on her
heart for ten years,--words that were said by Madame to a princess,
then dead, who had repeated them, word for word, to Mme. de Maintenon.
At the fall of this second thunderbolt Madame was turned into a
statue, and there was silence for some moments. Then followed tears,
cries, pardon, promises, and a reconciliation, which, being founded on
the cold triumph of Mme. de Maintenon and the inward humiliation of
Madame, could not of course last long.
It was soon after this scene and during the very short time that the
renewed friendship lasted that Madame wrote to Mme. de Maintenon the
following letter:--
Wednesday, June 15, 11 in the morning.
If I had not had fever and great agitation, Madame,
from the sad employment of yesterday, in opening the caskets
containing Monsieur's papers, scented with the most violent
perfumes, you would have heard from me earlier; but I can no
longer delay expressing to you how touched I am by the favours
that the king did yesterday to my son, and the manner in which
he has treated both him and myself; and as all this is the
result of your good counsels, Madame, be pleased to allow me to
express my sense of it, and to assure you that I shall keep,
very inviolably, the promise of friendship which I made to you;
I beg you to continue to me your counsels and advice, and not
to doubt a gratitude that can end only with my life.
ÉLISABETH CHARLOTTE.
Proud as Madame was, there was nothing for her, after such a step
and such a reconciliation so painful to the core, but to become
henceforth the intimate and cordial friend of Mme. de Maintenon, or
her implacable enemy. The latter sentiment prevailed. In spite of
efforts which may have been for a time sincere, the conditions and the
repugnances were too strong; antipathies rose up once more and carried
all before them.
Madame deserves consideration by more than one claim, and especially
because, having written much, her testimony stands and is invoked
in many cases. When the present edition of letters and fragments of
letters by M. Brunet is exhausted, why should he not undertake to
form a complete collection, leaving nothing out that could enrich
and enlighten it on the German side, and adding only such notes and
French erudition as may be strictly necessary? We should then have,
not exactly an historical document added to so many others, but a
great chronicle of manners and morals, a fiery social gossip, by one
whom we may call the Gui Patin or the Tallemant des Reaux of the end
of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth. We
should thus gain a vivid, witty, and ruthless book, which would make a
pendant to Saint-Simon on more than one ground.
Madame and Saint-Simon have this in common--they were two honest
souls at Court, honest souls whom indignation easily roused; often
passionate, prejudiced, and at such times ferocious and pitiless for
the adversary. Saint-Simon--need it be said?--has over Madame all the
superiority of a genius expressly made to sound and fathom hearts,
and to bring back living descriptions, which he gives us in strokes
of flame. Madame, often credulous, looking elsewhere, mixing things
up and little critical in her judgments, nevertheless sees well
what she does see, and renders it forcibly, with a violence which,
though little conformed to French taste, is none the less imprinted
on the memory. They knew each other and esteemed each other. They
had, without suspecting it, the same idiosyncrasies, which they
observed, reciprocally, in each other; one was astride of her rank as
princess and ever on the _qui-vive_ lest it should not be sufficiently
respected; the other, as we know, was intractable and even fanatical
on the chapter of dukes and peers.
Saint-Simon has spoken of Madame with truth and justice, as of a manly
nature somewhat in keeping with his own. All that we read in Madame's
letters, in which she declares herself to every eye, is only a sort of
demonstration and commentary of Saint-Simon's judgment upon her.
Madame was naturally just, humane, compassionate. She was very anxious
about her debts and her creditors, which the great of the earth are
not apt to be, and it was noticed that she was never easy unless she
had secured their payment,--"forestalling demands, sometimes wishes,
and always impatience or complaints." The letters she writes during
the terrible winter of 1709 breathe pity for the poor, who "are dying
of cold like flies." No princess ever had more consideration for
those who surrounded her and served her; "she preferred sometimes to
deprive herself of necessary attentions, rather than require them
when inconvenient to others." She was what is called a good mistress,
and the nearer her people came to her, the more they regretted her.
"Saint-Cloud," she wrote in the autumn of 1717, "is only a house for
summer; many of my people have to lodge in rooms without fireplaces;
they cannot pass the winter here, or I should be the cause of their
deaths, and I am not hard enough for that; the sufferings of others
make me pitiful."
Once only was she pitiless; but she was wounded then in her tenderest
spot. Mme. de Maintenon had imported from Strasburg (_expressly to
annoy me_, thought Madame) two girls of equivocal birth who called
themselves Comtesses Palatine and whom she placed in the suite of her
nieces. The first dauphine (Monseigneur's wife, a Princess of Bavaria)
spoke of this to Madame, weeping, but not daring to resent an affront
which was aimed at both. "Let me settle that," replied Madame. "I'll
manage it; for when I am right nothing frightens me." The next day
she arranged an accidental meeting in the park with one of the two
self-styled Comtesses Palatine, and treated her in such a manner (the
astounding terms have been preserved) that the poor girl was taken
ill, and finally died of it. Louis XIV. contented himself with saying
to Madame, "It is not safe to meddle with you in the matter of your
family--life depends upon it." To which Madame replied, "I don't like
impostors." And she never felt the slightest regret for what she
had done. The trait is characteristic in a nature that was otherwise
essentially kind. All vehement passion easily becomes cruel when face
to face with an object that irritates and braves it. In this case the
execution performed by Madame appeared to her under the form of a
rigorous duty of honour.
The life that Madame led at the Court of France varied, necessarily,
during the fifty and one years that she spent there; she could not
live at the age of sixty as she had done at twenty. But at all times,
before and after the death of Monsieur, she had managed to make
for herself a retreat and a sort of solitude. The exaggerated and
incongruous sides of Madame's nature being now sufficiently visible
and well known, I desire to neglect nothing that will show the firm
and elevated parts of her soul. From Saint-Cloud June 17, 1698, she
writes thus:--
"I do not need much consolation in the matter of death; I do not
desire death, neither do I dread it. There is no need of the Catechism
of Heidelberg to teach us not to be attached to this world; above
all in this country where all things are so full of falseness, envy,
and malignity, where the most unheard-of vices are displayed without
reserve. But to desire death is a thing entirely against nature. In
the midst of this great Court I live retired, as if in solitude; there
are very few persons with whom I have frequent intercourse; I am
whole, long days alone in my cabinet, where I busy myself in reading
and writing. If any one pays me a visit I see them for only a few
moments; I talk of rain and fine weather or the news of the day; and
after that I take refuge in my retreat. Four times a week I send off
my regular letters: Monday, to Savoie; Wednesday, to Modena; Thursday
and Sunday I write very long letters to my aunt in Hanover; from six
to eight o'clock I drive out with Monsieur and my ladies; three times
a week I go to Paris, and every day I write to my friends who live
there; I hunt twice a week; and this is how I pass my time."
When she speaks of solitude we see it is a Court solitude and much
diversified. Still it was remarkable that a woman of so grand a
station and a princess should spend so many hours daily alone in her
cabinet in company with her desk.
After the death of Monsieur, Madame could live more to her liking.
She regretted being obliged to dismiss her maids-of-honour, whose
youth and gayety amused her; but she gave herself a compensation after
her own heart, by taking to herself, without official title, two
friends, the Maréchale de Clérembault and the Comtesse de Beuvron,
both widows, whom Monsieur had dismissed with aversion from the Court
of the Palais-Royal, but to whom Madame had ever remained faithful
in absence. They were the "friends in Paris," to whom she wrote
continually. Becoming free herself, she wanted them near her, and
henceforth enjoyed, almost as a simple private person, that united
constant friendship in which she trusted.
Hunting was long one of Madame's greatest pleasures, or rather
passions. I have said that while a child at Heidelberg she gave
herself up to all manly exercises. Her father, however, forbade her
to hunt or to ride on horseback. It was in France, therefore, that
she served her apprenticeship, and her impetuosity often made it
dangerous. Twenty-six times was she thrown from her horse, without
being frightened or discouraged. "Is it possible," she says, "that you
have never seen a great hunt? I have seen more than a thousand stags
taken, and I have had bad falls; but out of twenty-six times that I
have been thrown from my horse I never hurt myself but once, and then
I dislocated my elbow."
The theatre was another passion, which, in her, was derived from
intelligence and her natural taste for things of the understanding.
It was the only pleasure (except that of writing letters) which
lasted to the end of her life. She was not of the opinion of Bossuet,
Bourdaloue, and other great religious oracles of the day in the matter
of theatres; she forestalled the opinion of the future and that of
the most indulgent moralists. "With regard to the priests who forbid
the theatre," she says, rather irreverently, "I shall say no more,
except this, that if they saw a little further than their own noses
they would understand that the money people spend on going to the
play is not ill-spent; in the first place, the comedians are poor
devils who earn their living that way; and next, comedies inspire joy,
joy produces health, health gives strength, strength produces good
work; therefore comedies should be encouraged, and not forbidden."
She liked to laugh, and the "Malade Imaginaire" diverted her to such
a degree that one might think in reading her letters that she was
trying to imitate all that is most physical and unfit for women in
its style of pleasantry. And yet "the 'Malade Imaginaire' is not the
one of Molière's plays that I like best," she says; "Tartuffe pleases
me better." And in another letter: "I cannot write longer, for I am
called to go to the theatre; I am to see the 'Misanthrope,' the one
of Molière's plays that gives me the most pleasure." She admired
Corneille and quotes the "Death of Pompey." I do not know whether she
liked "Esther," but she must surely have loved Shakespeare. "I have
often heard his Highness, our father," she writes to her half-sister,
"say that there are no comedies in the world finer than those of the
English."
After the death of Monsieur and during the last years of Louis XIV.
she adopted a way of life that was very precise and retired. "I
live here quite deserted (May 3, 1709) for everybody, young and old,
runs after favour. The Maintenon cannot endure me, and the Duchesse
de Bourgogne likes only what that lady likes." She became at last
absolutely a hermit in the midst of the Court. "I consort with no one
here, except my own people; I am as polite as I can be to everybody,
but I contract no intimate relations with any one, and I live alone;
I go to walk, I go to drive, but from two o'clock to half-past nine I
never see a human face; I read, I write, or I amuse myself in making
baskets like the one I sent my aunt." Sometimes, however, to enliven
this long interval from two o'clock to half-past nine, her ladies
would play at _hombre_ or _brelan_ beside her writing-table.
The regency of her son brought the Court again around Madame; and her
more frequent residence in Paris allowed her less retreat than she was
able to make at Versailles. Sometimes, in the morning, half a dozen
duchesses would take up her time and cut short her correspondence. She
detested their conversations of mere politeness, in which they talked
without having anything to say. "I would rather be alone than have to
give myself the trouble of finding something to say to each of them;
for the French think it very bad if you do not talk to them, and go
away discontented; one must therefore take pains to say something to
each; and so I am content and tranquil when they leave me to myself."
She made exception with less annoyance when it was a question of
Germans of high rank, who all wished to be presented to her, and whom
she greeted very well. At times there were as many as twenty-nine
German princes, counts, and gentlemen in her apartment.
One evening she made a scene before all present to the Duchesse de
Berry, her grand-daughter, who had appeared before her in a loose
gown, or rather in fancy dress, intending to go to the Tuileries in
such array. "No, madame," she said, cutting short all explanation,
"nothing excuses you; you might at least dress yourself properly the
few times you do go to see the king; I, who am your grandmother,
dress myself every day. Say honestly it is laziness that prevents you
from doing so; which belongs neither to your age nor to your station.
A princess should be dressed as a princess, and a soubrette as a
soubrette." While saying all this and not listening to the reply of
the Duchesse de Berry, Madame went on writing her letter in German,
her pen never ceasing to scratch the paper. The table on which she
wrote was a secretary somewhat raised, so that in her pausing moments
she could, without rising from her seat, look down upon the game of
the players beside her. "That was her occupation if she ceased to
write, but when any one came in and approached her she would leave
everything to ask them, 'What news?' and as the giving of news made
every one welcome, people invented it when there was none to tell. No
sooner had she heard it than, without examination, she turned to the
letter already begun and wrote down the tale she had just been told."
It is thus that, side by side with things that she sees well and says
well, and which are in truth the expression of her own thought, her
letters contain much else that is simply malignant gossip and trash.
In the days of Louis XIV. letters were unsealed at the post-office,
read, and extracts made and sent to the king, and sometimes to Mme.
de Maintenon. Madame knew that, but went her way in spite of it,
using her privilege as princess to tell truths without reserve, and
even to write insults on those who, unsealing the letters, would find
her opinion of them. "In the days of M. de Louvois," she writes,
"they read all letters just as they do now, but at least they sent
them on in decent time; but now that that toad of a Torcy directs
the post-office, letters are delayed for an interminable length of
time.... As Torcy does not know how to read German he has to have them
translated, and I don't thank him for his attention." M. de Torcy must
have enjoyed that passage.
Among the tastes, or fancies, which together with her letter-writing
served to fill and amuse the long hours of Madame's solitude, we
must reckon two parrots, a canary, and eight little dogs. "After my
dinner I walk my room for half an hour for the sake of digestion,
and play with my little animals." A nobler taste was that of coins,
which Madame had to a high degree. She collected them from all parts
of the world, and no one could pay their court more delicately than
by bringing her a specimen. The collection that she thus formed was
celebrated. She confided the care of it to the learned Baudelot, who
had all the erudition and naïveté of an antiquary, and with whom
she sometimes amused herself. "One study alone," says one of her
eulogists, "attracted her--that of coins. Her series of the emperors
of the upper and lower empire, which she collected with judgment and
arranged with care, placed before her eyes all that was most to be
respected in past ages. While examining the features on the coins she
recalled the salient points of their owners' actions, filling her mind
with noble ideas of Roman greatness." I do not know whether in forming
her cabinet of coins Madame had any such lofty and stern views, but
at any rate, in this most remarkable of her tastes she showed herself
the mother of the regent,--that is to say, of the most brilliant and
best-informed of amateurs.
There is a serious side in the letters of Madame: that by which she
judges the morals, the personages, and the society of the regency.
She had some trouble in breaking herself in to that new style of
life, and to a residence in the city and the Palais-Royal. "I like the
Parisians," she writes, "but I do not like to live in their town."
She had accustomed herself, during her long seasons at Saint-Cloud,
to a measure of retreat, companionship, and liberty which suited
her nature, and I shall even say, her semi-philosophy. When she
returned there she felt herself in her element. "I find myself well
at Saint-Cloud, where I am tranquil (1718); whereas in Paris I am
never left an instant in peace. This one presents me a petition, that
one asks me to interest myself on his behalf, another solicits an
audience, and so forth. In this world great people have their worries
like little ones, which is not surprising; but what makes it worse
for the great is that they are always surrounded by a crowd, so that
they can not hide their griefs, or indulge them in solitude--they are
always on exhibition."
That regret was in her a most sincere one. The power of her son
brought her little influence, and she wanted none, save for the sake
of a few private benefits. She asked him for nothing; she never
meddled in public affairs or politics, and piqued herself on not
understanding them. "I have no ambition," she said (August, 1719);
"I do not wish to govern; I should take no pleasure in it. It is not
so with French women; the lowest servant-woman thinks herself quite
fitted to rule the State. I think it so ridiculous that I am quite
cured of all mania of that kind."
She views like a virtuous woman the debauchery of the period, and that
of her family, and she expresses the deep disgust she feels for it.
The regent has never been better painted than he is by his mother; she
shows him to us with his facile faculties, his interests of all kinds,
his talents, his individual genius, his graces, his indulgence for
all, even for his enemies; she denounces the one great capital fault
that ruined him,--that ardent debauchery at a fixed hour, in which
he buried himself and was lost to sight until the next morning. "All
advice, all remonstrance on that subject," she writes, "are useless;
when spoken to he answers, 'From six o'clock in the morning till night
I am subjected to prolonged and fatiguing labour; if I did not amuse
myself after that I could not bear it, I should die of melancholy.'
I pray God sincerely for his conversion," she adds, "he has no
other fault than that, but that is great." She shows him to us as a
libertine even in matters of science, that is, curious and amorous of
all he saw, but disgusted with all he possessed. "Though he talks of
learned things, I see plainly that instead of giving him pleasure they
bore him. I have often scolded him for this; he answers it is not his
fault; that he does take pleasure in learning all things, but as soon
as he knows them he has no further pleasure in them."
The most characteristic passages in her letters are of things that
cannot be detached and cited singly. Never did the effrontery and
gluttony of women of all ranks, the cupidity of everybody, the
shameless traffic and cynical thirst for gold, find a firmer or
more vigorous hand to catch them in the act and blast them. Madame,
in treating of these excesses, has a species of virtuous immodesty
like that of Juvenal; or rather, issuing from her Bible readings,
she applies to present scandals the energy of the sacred text, and
qualifies them in the language of the patriarchs. "How many times,"
says one of her eulogists whom I like to quote, "how many times she
condemned the bold negligence of attire which favoured corruption, and
the taste for liberty and caprice--the fatal charm which our nation
has criminally invented! Indecent fashions, which ancient decorum
cannot away with, would often bring upon her face and in her eyes the
emotion and fire of outraged modesty." It was not a mere sentiment of
etiquette which made her rebuke her grand-daughter, the Duchesse de
Berry, on her dishabille, but another and a more estimable sentiment.
Even where she is not outraged she gives details which make her smile
with pity. "It is only too true that the women paint themselves blue
veins to make believe their skins are so delicate the veins show
through them."
The Duc de Richelieu, a young dandy who turned all the heads of the
day, and whom our writers, at their wits' end, have lately endeavoured
to restore to fashion in novels and plays, was to Madame an object
of extreme aversion; she paints him with the hand of a master,
as absolutely contemptible, with all his equivocal and frivolous
charms, his varnish of politeness, and his vices. It is a portrait
to read, and I should like to quote it here, but I am restrained
by respect for the great men, and for the honourable men, who have
made that name of Richelieu so French. Without going beyond general
observations what can be more just and more sensible than the
following reflection of Madame, written a few months before her death
(April, 1722)? "Young men, at the epoch in which we live, have but
two objects in view,--debauchery and lucre; the absorption of their
minds on money-getting, no matter by what means, makes them dull
and disagreeable; in order to be agreeable, people must have their
minds free of care, and also have the wish to give themselves up to
amusement in decent company; but these are things that are very far
away from us now-a-days." With a presentiment of her coming end, she
asks of God only his mercy to herself and her children, especially her
son. "May it please God to convert him! that is the sole favour that
I ask of Him. I do not believe that there are in Paris, either among
ecclesiastics or people of the world, one hundred persons who have a
true Christian faith, and really believe in our Saviour; and that
makes me tremble."
The people of Paris recognized in Madame a princess of honour and
integrity, incapable of giving bad advice or employing selfish
influence; consequently, she was in great favour with the Parisians;
more than she deserved, she said, meddling so little as she did in
their affairs. Even amid the riots and the execrations roused by
the catastrophes at the close of Law's system, Madame, as she drove
through the streets, received none but benedictions--which she would
gladly have transferred to her son. She noticed as a mother on that
occasion that if the cries were loud against Law, they were at least
not shouted against the regent. But there were other days when the
murmurs against her son reached her ears, and she complains of the
ingratitude of Frenchmen towards him. She was not, however, without
admitting to herself the element of weakness in his government; she
tells it and repeats it constantly. "It is very true," she says, "that
it is better to be kind than harsh, but justice consists in punishing,
as well as in rewarding; and it is certain that he who does not make
Frenchmen fear him will soon fear them; for they despise those who do
not intimidate them." She knows the nation, and judges it as one who
is not of it.
On one point Madame sacrificed to the spirit of the regency and was in
curious contradiction to herself. She took a great liking to a natural
son of the regent, whom he had by an opera-dancer named Florence;
she said he reminded her of the "late Monsieur," only with a better
figure. In short, she loved the young man, whom she called _her_ Abbé
de Saint-Albin. He was afterwards Archbishop of Cambrai, and when he
made his argument before the Sorbonne (February, 1718) she was present
in great state, thus declaring, and also honouring, the illegitimate
birth of this grandson. Madame deserted on that day all her orthodox
principles about the duties of rank, and allowed herself to follow her
fancies.
She died at the age of seventy at Saint-Cloud, December 8, 1722, ten
days after her faithful friend, the Maréchale de Clérembault, and one
year before her son, the regent. According to her own wish, she was
taken to Saint-Denis without pomp. The obsequies were performed in the
following February. Massillon, whom she knew and loved, pronounced
her funeral oration, which was thought fine. Père Cathalan, a Jesuit,
pronounced another at Laon in March, from which I have taken certain
traits of her character.
Such as she is, with all her coarseness and her contradictions on a
basis of virtue and honour, Madame is a useful, a precious, and an
incomparable witness as to manners and morals. She gives a hand to
Saint-Simon and to Dangeau--nearer, however, to the former than to the
latter. She has heart; do not ask charm of her, but say: "That Court
would have lacked the most original of figures and of voices if Madame
had not been of it." Arriving at Versailles at the moment when the La
Vallière star declined and was eclipsed, and seeing only the last of
the brilliant years, she enters little into that era of refinement
which touches the imagination; but lacking that refinement, and solely
through her frankness, she lays bare to us the second half of Louis
XIV.'s reign under its human, most human, natural, and--to say the
whole truth--its material aspect. She strips that great century of
its idealism, she strips it too much; she goes almost to the point
of degrading it--if we listen to her alone. As time goes on, and the
delicacy and purity of manners and language retire more and more into
Mme. de Maintenon's corner and seek at last a refuge at Saint-Cyr,
Madame holds herself aloof at Saint-Cloud, and again aloof in the
Palais-Royal, and thence--whether at the close of Louis XIV.'s reign
or under the regency--she makes, lance in hand, and her pen behind her
ear, valiant and frequent sorties in that blunt style which is all
her own, which wears a beard upon its chin, and of which we know not
rightly whether it derives from Luther or from Rabelais, though we are
very sure it is the opposite of that of Mme. de Caylus and her like.
TRANSLATOR'S NOTE.
Sainte-Beuve, in his essay on Madame, suggested to the French editor
of her letters that he should make a more complete collection of
them. M. Brunet professes to have done so in the edition from which
this translation is selected.[2] But when examined the additions
prove very insignificant, and the arrangement, though apparently more
chronological, interferes with the interest of the reader. Passages
which seem to belong together are cut up into sentences and scattered
singly over weeks and months; so that the point of Madame's racy
representations is often weakened. In this translation parts of the
letters of each year on a given topic are put together, so as to offer
a better picture of Madame's thought; as for her nature, she gives
that herself, and no one can better the portrait.
Nothing need be added to Sainte-Beuve's admirable essay beyond a brief
account of Madame's parentage, family relations, and the history, such
as it is, of her correspondence.
She was born at Heidelberg in 1652. Soon after her birth, her father,
Charles-Louis, Elector Palatine, parted from his wife, Charlotte of
Hesse-Cassel, and the little daughter, Élisabeth-Charlotte, was given
to the care of her father's sister, Sophia, Electress of Hanover
(mother of George I. of England); with whom she remained until her
marriage, against her wishes, in 1671, to Monsieur, brother of Louis
XIV., after the death of his first wife, Henrietta, daughter of
Charles I. of England. The marriage was political,--Louis XIV. seeking
to acquire rights in the Palatinate, and subsequently in Bavaria.
The father of Élisabeth-Charlotte, after parting from his wife,
married morganatically Louise de Degenfeld, by whom he had five
sons and three daughters,--these children being of course excluded
from the succession. Madame, in her ill-assorted and personally
mortifying marriage, of which she bravely strove to make the best,
found all her comfort in writing letters, a very small portion of
which have been preserved. All those addressed during her married
life to her beloved aunt, the Electress of Hanover, have disappeared,
probably destroyed by the judicious aunt herself, for Madame alludes
to them as containing secrets she did not write to others. Among
the many personages to whom she wrote habitually were: Duke Antoine
Ulrich of Brunswick; her two unmarried half-sisters, Louise and
Amélie, Countesses Palatine; her step-daughters, to whom she was
warmly attached, Marie-Louise, wife of Charles II., King of Spain,
and Anne-Marie, wife of Victor-Amadeus, Duke of Savoie and King
of Sardinia and Sicily (the mother of Marie-Adélaïde, Duchesse de
Bourgogne); and her own daughter, the Duchesse de Lorraine. Besides
these, she had a number of correspondents on the other side of the
Rhine, such as her cousins the Queen of Prussia and the Duchess of
Modena; her old governess in Hanover; Leibnitz in Leipzig; also the
Princess of Wales, Wilhelmina-Caroline of Brandebourg-Anspach, in
London.
Of these letters (scarcely any remaining extant except those to
her half-sisters) fragments first appeared at Stuttgard in 1789,
subsequently in Paris, in 1807, 1823, 1832. In 1843 the first edition
in a volume was published at Stuttgard by M. Wolfgang Menzel, a
translation of which by M. Brunet appeared in Paris in 1853. That
translation was made from the German volume, the original letters
having disappeared in a conflagration. A subsequent edition, with a
few insignificant additions as mentioned above, appeared a few years
later, from the last issue of which the present translation has been
selected.
M. Brunet remarks in his preface, that "Madame had the habit of
reproducing almost in the same terms the details which she gave of
the same events to diverse persons. She wrote with extreme rapidity,
passing, without any transition, from one subject to another, piling
up useless words and insignificant particulars which it would be quite
absurd to try to reproduce. Expressions of regret at the deaths or the
illnesses of Madame's numerous relatives, interminable protestations
of friendship, wearisome repetitions, swelled beyond all measure the
letters that came into the hands of M. Menzel, who cut off two-thirds
of them, preserving such parts only as had a more or less general
interest and an historical value."
The following letters are almost exclusively addressed to her
half-sisters, and chiefly to the Comtesse Louise, the Comtesse Amélie
having died in 1709. The names of her correspondents do not precede
the letters in the French edition, except in a few instances.
Madame needs no interpreter, for even her vituperative faculty conveys
its own correction; her hatred to Mme. de Maintenon becomes amusing,
and we are quite able to see the justice and the injustice of it. Her
favourite term for her enemy is, however, so outrageous (_la vieille
guenipe_, the old slut, or any such equivalent--once she descends to
saying _la vieille truie_) that it is more agreeable to the reader to
keep the word in French than to constantly repeat it in English.
Madame died on the 8th of December, 1722, at the age of seventy, just
one year before the death of her son, the regent. She was buried in
Saint-Denis, and Massillon pronounced her funeral oration.
* * * * *
The letters of Adélaïde de Savoie, Duchesse de Bourgogne and dauphine,
are of little value, as the reader will see, if judged historically,
or as a document on the manners and customs of a period. They are
placed here as a contemporary record of a tender and pathetic young
life on its passage, through frivolity and ill-health, to a premature
death just as age had corrected her defects, and the prospect of
being, with her husband, the blessing and salvation of France was
dawning before her.
* * * * *
Sainte-Beuve possessed a natural spirit of justice which led him
(though it did not invariably rule him) to satisfy his literary
conscience by returning to the portraits of his personages to correct,
modify, and balance his first impressions. It is in this spirit that
his picture of Mme. de Maintenon and Saint-Cyr, followed by a number
of her own letters and papers on that section of her life, are given
here to succeed the prejudiced statements of her two greatest enemies,
Saint-Simon and Madame. The picture of Saint-Cyr stands apart in Mme.
de Maintenon's career in a frame of its own; it shows her at her very
best and as she herself would fain appear to posterity. It is the
other extreme of the portraiture, and the reader must form his own
judgment as to how the full truth of the nature and conduct of this
remarkable woman can be evolved.
CORRESPONDENCE OF MADAME.
I.
LETTERS OF 1695-1714.
_To her sister Louise, Comtesse Palatine._
VERSAILLES, 1695.
King James of England is not willing that we should wear mourning
for his daughter [Mary]; he has vehemently insisted that nothing of
the kind should be done. He is not at all moved by this death, which
surprises me, for I should think a man could not forget his children,
no matter what wrongs he has against them; blood must surely keep its
strength. From the portrait they made me of Prince [King] William, I
should not have thought he was so much attached to his wife; and I
like him for it.
I am very glad to hear that Charles-Maurice [her half-brother] loves
me, though he has never seen me; that is the effect of blood. It is
not surprising that I love him, for I saw him come into the world;
and besides, I have always retained such respect for his Highness
our father that I love all those who are his children. I wish that
Charles-Maurice may soon be made a colonel. We die when our time
comes; Maurice will not live beyond the period that fate assigns him,
whether he stays at Court or goes to war. He had better follow his
inclination, for all that is done from liking is better done than when
one yields to constraint.
We have here a Comte de Nassau, a very brave man and much respected.
He holds a patent from the emperor authorizing him to take the title
of prince; but he makes no use of it, for which I think very well of
him. Dancing has gone out of fashion everywhere. Here, in France, as
soon as the company assemble they do nothing but play _lansquenet_;
that is the game in vogue; even the young people do not care to dance.
As for me, I do neither. I am much too old to dance, which I have
not done since the death of our father. I never play cards for two
reasons: first, I have no money; and next, I don't like gambling. They
play here for frightful sums, and the players are like madmen; one
howls, another strikes the table so hard that the room resounds, a
third blasphemes in such a way that one's hair stands on end, and they
all seem beside themselves and are terrifying to see.
I beg you to greet for me all our old friends in the Palatinate;
I curse this war to-day more than ever. My poor son, who has been
seriously ill and is still taking quinine, was engaged in that affair
when Maréchal de Villeroy fell upon the rear-guard of the Prince de
Vaudemont and put four battalions to flight. Though my son has had the
luck to escape a wound, I tremble lest fatigue should bring back his
fever. A good peace is much to be desired.
I regard it as great praise that people should say I have a German
heart and that I love my country; I shall endeavour, by the grace of
God, to deserve that praise to my last day. I have indeed a German
heart, for I cannot console myself for what is happening in that
unfortunate Palatinate; I cannot think about it; it makes me sad all
day. Next Saturday I return, with regret, to Paris, which I think very
disagreeable.
There is nothing in the world so miserable as the fate of a Queen of
Spain; I know this by the late queen, who used to write me day by day
the existence that she led. It is even worse in Portugal, and it shows
the truth of the proverb that all is not gold that glitters.
I was too old when I came to France to change my character, the
foundations were laid. There is nothing surprising in that; but I
should be inexcusable if I were false and did not love the persons
for whom I ought to feel an attachment. You have reason to think
that I write as I think; I am too frank to write otherwise. The good
Duchesse de Guise, cousin of the king and of Monsieur, died five days
ago. I have felt much afflicted; she was a worthy, pious woman; we
dined together every day. There was only an antechamber between my
room and her cabinet. She kept her mind till the last moment, and died
tranquilly, without regrets.
VERSAILLES, 1697.
If I had not heard from my aunt that you were going to Holland, I
should have been quite surprised at getting your letter from the
Hague. My health is now pretty good; as usual, I have driven away
the fever by hunting. I have had the satisfaction to do some service
to the prisoners who have been brought here. I cannot do much, but I
shall spare no pains to be useful to compatriots who may need me.
I remember the Hague perfectly; I always thought it a very agreeable
city, but the air is not as good as it is in the Palatinate and
everything is so very dear in Holland. King William is not at Loo, but
at the head of his army; God grant there may not be a battle, for I
can't help trembling at the thought of it because of my son. The fate
of those good people of the Palatinate makes me wretched; but I can do
nothing to prevent it. Let us all unite in prayers for peace, for it
is indeed very needful.
It is deplorable that the priests have brought it about that
Christians are divided one against another. If I had my way, the three
Christian religions should form but one; we should not ask what people
believed, but whether they lived in accordance with the Gospel, and
the priests should preach against those who lead bad lives. Christians
ought to be allowed to marry and go to church where they like; and
then there would be more harmony than there is now.
I think so well of King William that I would rather have him for
a son-in-law than the Emperor of Germany. I can say with truth of
my daughter that she has no idea of coquetry or gallantry; in that
respect she gives me no anxiety, and I think I shall never have
anything to fear; she is not handsome, but she has a pretty figure,
a good face, and good feelings. I am convinced that she will stay an
old maid, for, according to all appearance, King William will marry
the Princess of Denmark. I fancy that the emperor will take the second
Princess of Savoie, and the Duc de Lorraine the daughter of the
emperor, so that no one will be left for my daughter.
I don't know if you remember how gay I was in my youth; all that has
gone; I have been more than six weeks without laughing even once. The
theatre is what amuses me the most. If you knew all that goes on here
you would certainly not be surprised that I am no longer gay. Another
in my place would have been dead of grief this long while; as for me,
I only grow fat upon it.
[Illustration: Saint-Cloud]
SAINT-CLOUD.
I received two weeks ago your letter of May 21, but I could not answer
it, for I was not in a state to write, and Mlle. de Rathsamhausen [her
lady-of-honour] spells so badly that I do not care to dictate to
her.[3] I must tell you what has happened to me. Once a month I go
with Monseigneur the dauphin to hunt a wolf. It had rained; the ground
was slippery; we had searched for a wolf two hours without finding
one, and then started for another point, where we hoped to do better.
As we were following a wood-path a wolf sprang up just in front of my
horse, which was frightened and reared on its hind legs and slipped
and fell over on its right side, and my elbow coming in contact with
a big stone was dislocated. They looked for the king's surgeon who
was with the hunt, but could not find him, for his horse had lost a
shoe and he had gone to a village to have it put on. A peasant said
there was a very skilful barber two leagues off who set legs and arms
every day of his life; when I heard he had such experience I got into
a calèche and was driven to him--not without very great pain. As soon
as he had set my arm I suffered nothing and drove back here at once.
My surgeon and Monsieur's surgeon examined the hurt. I think they were
rather jealous that a poor countryman had done the thing so well.
They bandaged my arm again and made me suffer beyond measure; my hand
swelled up in a horrible manner; I could not move my wrist or lift my
hand to my mouth.
It is very true that celibacy is the best condition; the best of men
is not worth the devil. Love in marriage is no longer the fashion, and
is thought ridiculous. The Catholics here say in their catechism that
marriage is a sacrament, but, in point of fact, they live with their
wives as if it were no sacrament at all, and, what is worse, nothing
is more approved than to see men have gallantries and desert their
wives--But not to enlarge upon this subject, I will talk to you about
my wolf.
You have heard by this time that peace has been signed with the
emperor and the empire; that is a great step towards a general peace.
I do not think that war will break out in Poland, for it is not at all
certain that our Prince de Conti will go there; he may renounce it,
which I think would be much better for him than the crown of Poland;
it is a savage, dirty country, and the nobles are too ambitious.
These are dangerous times for young men, and they would do better to
go and seek honour in war than stay here doing nothing and leading the
most dissolute lives, for which, be it said between you and me, my son
has but too great a liking. He says he has taste only for women and
not for other debauchery, which is as common here as it is in Italy,
and therefore he thinks we ought to praise him and be grateful to him;
but his behaviour does not please me at all.
Those who do not know the exact situation of things here imagine that
the king and Court are just what they used to be; but everything is
changed in a sorry way. If any one who had left the Court at the time
of the queen's death returned here now he would think he had stepped
into another world. There is much to be said about this, but I cannot
confide it to paper, because all letters are opened and read. My aunt
used to say that everybody here below is a demon charged to torment
somebody else; and that is very true. We know that all things are
the result of the will of God, and happen as He has fixed from all
eternity, but the Almighty not having consulted us on what He meant to
do, we are in ignorance of the causes of what we see going on about us.
FONTAINEBLEAU, 1698.
I have not written to you for several days because I have been to
Montargis, whence we have come back here, where we found the courier
who brought us the dispensation for my daughter's marriage. It will
take place Monday next and two days later she will start. [Mlle. de
Chartres married Léopold, Duc de Lorraine, and was the mother of
Francis I., Emperor of Germany, the husband of Maria Theresa.] You can
easily imagine that my heart is full, and that I am nearer to weeping
than laughing, for my daughter and I have never been separated, and
now we are to part for a long time. My eyes are full of tears, but
I must hide them; otherwise people would laugh at me, for in this
country they do not understand how it is that persons should love
their relations. One repents very soon of speaking out one's thoughts,
and that is why I live such a solitary life. You are very happy in
being able to laugh still; it is a long time since I have done so,
though formerly I used to laugh more than any one. Persons have only
to marry in France and the desire to laugh will soon leave them.
The King of England is not, I think, in much of a hurry to be married.
That monarch is certainly, on account of his merit, one of the
greatest kings that ever wore a crown; but between ourselves, if I
were maid or widow and he did me the honour to want to marry me, I
would rather pass my life in celibacy than become the greatest queen
in the world on condition of taking a husband, for marriage has become
to me an object of horror.
What is worse in this country than in England is that all the persons
who conduct themselves ill, men and women, devote themselves to
politics and seek to intrigue at Court, which leads to much perfidy
and deception. In whatever country we live, if we are married we must
drive jealousy out of our hearts, for it does no good; we must wash
our hands in innocency and keep our conscience pure, although we may
have no pleasant intercourse and nothing but long and weary hours of
ennui. I do not fret myself now about the way the world goes on; I
despise it, and I have little taste for being in society. One hears of
nothing just now but tragical events; they have lately condemned five
women who killed their husbands; others killed themselves.
Nothing is so rare in France as Christian faith; there is no longer
any vice of which persons are ashamed. If the king wanted to punish
all those who are guilty of the worst vices he would find no more
princes or nobles or servants about him; there would not be a family
in France that was not in mourning.
FONTAINEBLEAU, 1699.
I receive sometimes very friendly letters from the Queen of Spain
[wife of Charles II.]. I am sorry that poor queen is so unhappy. It
would be a great blessing for Europe if she could have a child, boy
or girl would do, provided it lived; for one does not need to be a
prophet to divine that if the King of Spain dies without children a
terrible war will arise; all the Powers will claim the succession, and
none of them will yield to any of the others; nothing but a war can
decide.
I have heard with grief of the conduct of Charles-Maurice in Berlin;
if he behaves in that way we shall not continue good friends. I am
very angry to know that he is dead-drunk nearly half the day. If I
thought that scolding him very severely would correct him I would
write to him. It is distressing to think that the only remaining son
of our father should be a drunkard.
MARLY, 1700.
It is not a mere tale that the King of Morocco has asked in marriage
the Princesse de Conti [daughter of Louis XIV. and Louise de la
Vallière], but the king repulsed the proposal sharply. That princess
was extremely beautiful before she had the small-pox, but her illness
has greatly changed her. She still has a perfect figure and charming
carriage, and dances admirably; I never saw any engraved portrait that
was like her.
I can understand why people go to Rome, like my cousin the Landgrave
of Cassel, to see the antiquities, but I cannot imagine that they
should go to be present at all those priests' ceremonies, for nothing
is more tiresome. Perhaps some people go for the thirty thousand
_dames galantes_ who are said to be there; but those who like such
merchandise have only to come to France, where they will find them in
abundance. Those who want to repent of their sins need not go to Rome;
to repent sincerely in their own homes is quite as profitable. Here no
one cares about Rome or the pope; they are quite convinced they can
get to heaven without him.
I seldom see Monsieur here [Marly]; we do not dine together; he plays
cards all day, and at night we are each in our own room. Monsieur
has the weakness to think that when he is overlooked at cards he has
ill-luck; so I never assist at his games. He has frightened us very
much by having a quartan fever; this is the day it is due to return,
but, thanks to God, he feels nothing of it yet, and he is in the
salon, playing cards.
All letters entering or leaving France are opened; I know that very
well, but it does not trouble me; I continue to write what comes into
my head.
_To Madame de Maintenon._
SAINT-CLOUD, June 15, 1701.[4]
If I had not had fever and great agitation, Madame, from the sad
employment of yesterday in opening the caskets of Monsieur's papers,
scented with the most violent perfumes, you would have heard from
me earlier; but I can no longer delay expressing to you how touched
I am by the favours that the king did yesterday to my son, and the
manner in which he has treated both him and myself; and as all this
is the result of your good counsels, Madame, be pleased to allow me
to express my sense of it and to assure you that I shall keep, very
inviolably, the promise of friendship which I made to you; I beg
you to continue to me your counsels and advice, and not to doubt a
gratitude which can end only with my life.
_To Louise, Comtesse Palatine._
VERSAILLES, July 15, 1701.
My health is still much weakened; this is the first time for eight
days that the fever has left me. Since the blow that struck me I have
had eighteen paroxysms of fever, and I thought it was the will of God
to end my sad life; but it was not so. I am left with great lassitude
and weakness of the legs, which I attribute to the shock of Monsieur's
death; they continued to tremble for twenty-four hours as if from a
violent attack of fever. Nothing could have been more dreadful than
what I witnessed. At nine o'clock in the evening Monsieur left my
room, gay and laughing; at half-past ten they called me, and I found
him almost unconscious; but he recognized me and said a few words
with much difficulty. I stayed the whole night beside him, and the
next morning at six o'clock, when there was no longer any hope, they
carried me away unconscious.
I am grateful to you for the share you take in my misfortune, which
is dreadful, and I thank you with all my heart. I beg you to let the
Queen-dowager of Denmark know how much I am touched that her Majesty
has remembered me in my trouble.
I have need to find, in my sad situation, something to divert my
thoughts; everything is forbidden to me at present except walking; my
greatest comfort is the kindness of the king, of which he continues to
give me many proofs. He comes to see me and takes me to walk with him.
Saturday was the day when Monsieur was interred, and though I was not
present, I wept much, as you can well imagine.
I have every reason to rejoice in the king's favour, and so has my
son, whom the king has made a very great seigneur. I am well pleased
for him; we live happily together; he is a good lad with very good
feelings.
October, 1701.
My health is now perfect, and to keep it so I drive out as much as I
can. All the others hunt daily with the king, and go twice a week to
the theatre. I am deprived of those things, as you know, and between
ourselves, it is not a little privation to be obliged to forego those
two amusements. I walk out often on foot and go a good three miles
in the forest; that disperses the melancholy that would otherwise
crush me; especially when I hear talk about public affairs of which
I had previously never heard a word in all my life. I should be very
fortunate if I could understand them as you do, but I never could,
and at fifty one is too old to begin to learn; I should only make
myself as annoying and irritating as a bed-bug. Apropos of bed-bugs,
they nearly ate up the little Queen of Spain on her passage up the
Mediterranean in the Spanish galleys. Her people were obliged to sit
up with her all night. She arrived a few days ago at Toulon, and went
from there by land to Barcelona because, so she wrote me, she could
not endure the sea any longer. I would not be in her place; to be a
queen is painful in any country, but to be Queen of Spain is worst of
all.
I must acknowledge that the death of King James has made me very sad;
his widow is in a situation to melt a heart of rock. The good king
died with a firmness I cannot describe, and with as much tranquillity
as if he were going to sleep. The evening before his death he said: "I
forgive my daughter with all my heart for the harm she did me; and I
pray God to pardon her, and also the Prince of Orange and all my other
enemies." The Queen of England cannot be consoled for the death of
her husband, though she bears her sorrow with Christian resignation.
I have nothing new to tell you; I walk and read and write; sometimes
the king drives me to the hunt in his calèche. There are hunts every
day; Sundays and Wednesdays are my son's days; the king hunts Mondays
and Thursdays; Wednesdays and Saturdays Monseigneur hunts the wolf;
M. le Comte de Toulouse, Mondays and Wednesdays; the Duc du Maine,
Tuesdays; and M. le Duc, Fridays. They say if all the hunting kennels
were united there would be from 900 to 1000 dogs. Twice a week there
is a comedy. But you know, of course, that I go nowhere; which vexes
me, for I must own that the theatre is the greatest amusement I have
in the world, and the only pleasure that remains to me.
You are wrong in supposing that I have ceased to read the Bible; I
read three chapters every morning. You ought not to imagine that
French Catholics are as silly as German Catholics; it is quite another
thing,--one might almost say it is another religion. Any one reads
Holy Scripture who chooses. Nobody here thinks the pope infallible,
and when he excommunicated Lavardin in Rome everybody laughed and
never dreamed of a pilgrimage. There is as much difference in France
from the Catholic of Germany as there is from those of Italy and Spain.
Those who wish to serve God in truth and according to His word should
read Holy Scripture every day; otherwise we sit in darkness. I am
persuaded that good religion is founded on the word of God, and
consists in having Jesus Christ in the heart; all the rest is only the
prating of priests. Of whatever religion we be, it is only by works
that true faith is shown, and only by them can it be judged who does
right. To love God and our neighbour is the law and the prophets, as
our Lord Jesus Christ teaches us.
I heard yesterday, through a letter from my aunt, the Electress of
Brunswick, of the death of our poor Charles-Maurice. I am sincerely
afflicted by it, and I pity you from the bottom of my heart. If
Charles-Maurice had not loved wine so much he would have been a
perfect philosopher. He has paid dear for his fault, for I am sure
that drunkenness shortened his life; he could not keep from drinking,
and he burnt up his body.
If the Court of France was what it used to be one might learn here
how to behave in society; but--excepting the king and Monsieur--no
one any longer knows what politeness is. The young men think only of
horrible debauchery. I do not advise any one to send their children
here; for instead of learning good things, they will only take lessons
in misconduct. You are right in blaming Germans who send their sons
to France; how I wish that you and I were men and could go to the
wars!--but that's a completely useless wish to have. The higher one's
position in life the more polite we ought to be in order to set a good
example to others. It is impossible to be more polite than the king;
but his children and grandchildren are not so at all. If I could with
propriety return to Germany you would see me there quickly. I love
that country; I think it more agreeable than all others, because there
is less of luxury that I do not care for, and more of the frankness
and integrity which I seek. But, be it said between ourselves, I was
placed here against my will, and here I must stay till I die. There
is no likelihood that we shall see each other again in this life; and
what will become of us after that God only knows.
VERSAILLES, 1704.
There are very few women here who are not coquettes by nature; it
is excessively rare to meet any. Before God that is perhaps very
reprehensible, but before men it is thought a fair game. The coquettes
flatter themselves that, our Lord having shown in Holy Scripture so
much charity for persons of their stripe, he will certainly have
compassion for them; the cases of Mary Magdalen, of the Samaritan
woman, and of the woman taken in adultery make them easy in mind. You
must not think that they ever tire of coquetry; they cannot do without
it, so to speak, and they never get tired of it. Drunkenness is but
too much the fashion among the young women; but just now they are all
in a state of complete satisfaction. Nothing is thought of but how to
amuse the Duchesse de Bourgogne with collations, presents, fireworks,
and other rejoicings:
I have not been able to perform the good work of keeping fast this
Lent. I cannot endure fish, and I am quite convinced that we can do
better works than spoiling our stomachs by eating too much of it.
Are you simple enough to believe that Catholics have none of the true
foundations of Christianity? Believe me, the aim of Christianity is
the same in all Christians; the differences that we see are only
priests' jargon, which does not concern honest men. What does concern
us is to live well as Christians, to be merciful, and to apply
ourselves to charity and virtue. Preachers ought to recommend all that
to Christians, and not squabble as they do over quantities of points,
as if they understood them; but this, of course, would diminish
the authority of those gentlemen, and so they busy themselves with
disputes, and not with what is more necessary and most essential.
I have in no way approved of the ill-treatment of the Reformers; but
as to that, one must blame politics, which is a subject to be treated
of _tête-à-tête_ and not touched upon by way of the post. I shall
therefore follow your good example and write of something else.
The jubilee bull has not converted all the abbés, for there are
still a goodly number of them in Paris who court the women. I never
in my life could understand how any one could fall in love with an
ecclesiastic. Neither you nor your sister are coquettes; I can truly
say I recognize my blood. What prevents one here from contracting
sincere friendships is that one can never be sure of reciprocity;
there is so much egotism and duplicity. And so one must either live in
a very sad and wearisome solitude, or resign one's self to many griefs.
VERSAILLES, 1705.
I was never scolded for sleeping in church, and so I have acquired a
habit of it which I cannot get rid of. In the mornings I do not go to
sleep; but in the evenings, after dinner, it is impossible for me to
keep awake. I never sleep at the theatre, but I do, very often, at the
opera. I believe the devil cares very little whether I sleep or not in
church; sleep is not a sin, but the result of human weakness. I see
you are too devout to go to the theatre on Sunday; but I think that
visiting is more dangerous than the theatre; for it is difficult in a
visit not to say harm of your neighbour, which is a much worse sin
than seeing a comedy. I should never approve of going to the theatre
instead of going to church; but after having fulfilled one's duties to
God, I think the theatre is less dangerous for a scrupulous conscience
than conversation.
Many Frenchwomen, especially those who have been coquettish and
debauched, as soon as they grow old and can no longer have lovers,
make themselves devout--or, at least, they say they are. Usually such
women are very dangerous; they are envious and cannot endure others.
But I must stop, my dear Louise; I am sweating in a terrible way.
The heat is extraordinary; it is two months since a drop of rain has
fallen, and the leaves are frying on the trees.
I know very well what it is to be exposed in hunting to a burning sun;
many a time I have stayed with the hounds from early morning till five
in the evening, and in summer till nine at night. I come in red as
a lobster, with my face all burned; that is why my skin is so rough
and brown. No one pays any attention here to the dust; I have seen
in travelling such clouds of it that we could not see each other in
the coach, and yet the king never ordered the horsemen to keep back.
The good night air does no one any harm; at Marly I often walk out by
moonlight.
VERSAILLES, 1706.
Amélie [another sister, Comtesse Palatine] writes me that she has
answered the king of Prussia, and makes many jokes about it. I would
reply to her in the same tone, but since the day before yesterday I
have lost all desire to laugh and joke. We received news that, the
orders of my son [with the army of Italy] not having been followed,
the lines before Turin have been forced; my son has two severe wounds:
one in the thigh, but a flesh wound only; the other through the right
arm, without the bone being broken. The surgeons assure us there is
no danger to life; God grant it! For two days I have done nothing but
weep; they tell me he is not in danger, but his sufferings grieve me;
my eyes are so swollen and red I cannot see out of them.
The siege of Turin and the catastrophe that has ended it, almost
costing me the life of my son, makes me sigh more than ever for peace.
I have been so harassed for the last three days that I think I should
have lost my mind if the anxiety had lasted longer. I have constantly
said that they ought to make those two kings of Spain [she means
the claimants of the throne, Philippe V. and the Archduke Charles]
wrestle together, and whichever had the strongest wrist should win;
such a singular combat to settle the fate of a kingdom would be more
Christian than to shed the blood of so many men.
We have here a species of pietists who are what they call quietists;
but they are much better than the pietists of Germany; they are not
so debauched. The King of Siam, when our king wanted to convert him
to Christianity, replied that he thought people could be saved in all
religions, and that God, who had willed that the leaves of the trees
should be of different colored greens, wished to be worshipped in
diverse manners; therefore the King of France ought to continue to
serve God in the way to which he was accustomed; while, for himself,
he should adore God in his way, and if God wished him to change He
would inspire him with the will to do so. I think that king was not
far wrong. I believe that a long time will elapse before the last
judgment; we have not yet seen Antichrist.
I thank you for the medals you have sent me; but I should like to
receive those that are made against France. I already have the most
insulting,--those that were struck in the reign of King William. The
king and the ministers have them, therefore you need not hesitate to
send them to me on the first occasion.[5]
I have received your letters from Heidelberg and Frankfort, and I
answered them; but my letters to you, dear Louise, are all in the
packet to my aunt which has been detained so long that we are nearly
crazy about it. But that is what the all-powerful dame and the
ministers succeed in--far better than they do in governing the kingdom.
VERSAILLES, 1709.
Never in my life did I know so gloomy a period. The people are dying
of cold like flies. The mills are stopped, and that has forced many to
die of hunger. Yesterday they told me a sorrowful story about a woman
who stole a loaf of bread from a baker's shop in Paris. The baker
wanted to arrest her; she said, weeping, "If you knew my misery you
would not take the loaf away from me; I have three little children all
naked; they ask me for bread; I cannot bear it, and that is why I have
stolen the loaf." The commissary before whom they took the woman told
her to take him where she lived; he went there, and found the three
little children sitting in a corner under a heap of rags, trembling
with cold as if they had the ague. "Where is your father?" he asked
the eldest. The child answered, "Behind the door." The commissary
looked to see why the father was hiding behind the door, and recoiled
with horror--the man had hung himself in despair. Such things are
happening daily.
I am very much deserted here, for every one, young and old, runs after
favour. The Maintenon cannot endure me, and the Duchesse de Bourgogne
likes only what that lady likes. I have done my best to conciliate
that all-powerful person, but I cannot succeed in doing so. So I am
excluded from everything, and I never see the king except at supper.
I can only act according to the will of others. I was less bound when
Monsieur was living. I dare not sleep away from Versailles without the
king's permission. It is not wrong, therefore, that I should wish to
be with you in our dear Palatinate; but God does not will that here
below we should be fully satisfied. You and Amélie are free, but your
health is bad; I am lonely, but my health, thank God, is perfect.
You are mistaken if you think that no lamentations are heard here;
night and day we hear of nothing else; the famine is so great that
children have eaten each other. The king is so determined to continue
the war that yesterday he gave up his gold service and now uses
porcelain; he has sent every gold thing he has to the mint to be
turned into coin.
All that one sees and hears is dreadful; we are living in a very fatal
epoch. If one leaves the house one is followed by a crowd of poor
creatures who cry famine; all payments are made in notes; there is no
coin anywhere; all one's contentment is destroyed till better days
appear.
The old lady who is here in such great favour hates me; I have done my
best to obtain her good will, but I cannot succeed; she has vowed to
me and to my son an implacable hatred. One must do what is reasonable
and walk a straight path: God will see to it all.
But that all-powerful lady has always been against me. In the days of
Monsieur his favourites feared that I should tell the king how they
pillaged Monsieur, and how they troubled me with their profligate
lives, and so they wished to get that lady on their side; and to
do so, they told her they knew her life, and that if she was not
for them, they would tell all to the king.[6] (I knew from the lady
herself that a union existed between them, but she did not tell me its
cause, which I learned from a friend of the Chevalier de Lorraine.)
She has persecuted me all her life, and she does not trust a hair of
my head because she thinks me as vindictive as she is herself--which
I am not--and so she tries to keep me away from the king. There is
another reason besides: the affection that she has for the Duchesse
de Bourgogne. As she knows very well that the king, whom I love and
respect much, has no antipathy to me, and that my natural humour
does not displease him, she is afraid that he might prefer a woman
of my age to so young a princess as the Duchesse de Bourgogne; and
that is one reason why she wants to keep me away from the king--which
she takes every possible means to do, so that there is no chance of
changing matters.
MARLY, 1709.
I wish you could be with us here, just to see how beautiful the
gardens are; but one ought to be able to walk about them with kind
and agreeable people, and not with persons who hate and despise one
another mutually,--sentiments that are met with here more frequently
than those of friendship. Last Wednesday I went to Paris; every
one was in alarm about the bread-famine. As I was going to the
Palais-Royal, the people called out to me: "There is a riot; forty
persons are killed already." An hour later the Maréchal de Boufflers
and the Duc de Grammont had appeased it all; we went tranquilly to the
opera and returned to Versailles on Saturday.
VERSAILLES, June, 1710.
I have to inform you of the marriage of my grand-daughter
[Marie-Louise-Élisabeth] to the Duc de Berry. Monday, the king came
to my room at Marly and announced to me that he should declare it
publicly the next day. I had been told of it the night before, with an
express injunction not to breathe it to a living soul. Tuesday I went
to Saint-Cloud to congratulate the princess; Wednesday she came to
Marly; her mother and I presented her to the king, who kissed her and
presented her to her future husband. She will be fifteen in August,
and she is already two inches taller than I. The dispensations from
Rome have been sent for, and as soon as they arrive the marriage will
take place. I own it causes me a most sincere joy.
VERSAILLES, July, 1710.
This afternoon at five o'clock the contract will be signed in the
king's cabinet, and the marriage will take place on the 11th, in
the morning, without any pomp; but at night there is to be a grand
reception and supper, with the king, of all the royal family. It is a
very queer history how this marriage was brought about; but it cannot
be written _by post_; it is to hatred rather than attachment that we
owe it; but, at any rate, this marriage is better assorted than that
of the Landgrave of Homburg, for the husband is nine years older than
the wife, which is much better than when the wife is older than the
husband.
MARLY, April, 1711.
We have just met with a great misfortune. Monsieur le dauphin
[Monseigneur] died on Friday, at eleven o'clock in the evening, just
as they thought him out of danger. He first had a putrid fever,
which changed into small-pox, to which he succumbed. The king spent
the night with him, but forbade us to go there. I went to see
Monseigneur's children and found them in a state that would have
melted the heart of stones.[7] The king is extremely affected, but he
shows a firmness and a submission to the will of God which I cannot
express. He speaks to every one, and gives orders with resignation.
What consoles him is that Monseigneur's confessor assures him that
his conscience was in a very satisfactory state; he had taken the
communion at Easter and he died in very religious sentiments. The king
expresses himself in such a Christian way that it goes to my heart,
and I cried all day long yesterday.
VERSAILLES, May, 1711.
I am unworthy to hear good sermons, for I cannot help sleeping; the
tones of the preachers' voices send me off at once. We are here in the
greatest grief. I have told you already how poor Monsieur le dauphin
died unexpectedly. His illness was dreadful. The Duchesse de Villeroy
only spoke to her husband, who had been in the dauphin's room at
Meudon, and she was infected and died of it.
The king is a good Christian, but very ignorant in matters of
religion. He has never in his life read the Bible; he believes all the
priests and the canting bigots tell him; it is therefore no wonder
he goes astray. They tell him he must act in such and such a way; he
knows no better, and thinks he will be damned if he listens to other
advice than that of his regular counsellors.
The dauphin was not without intelligence; he was quick to seize on
all absurdities, his own as well as those of others. He could relate
things very amusingly when he chose, but his laziness was such that
it made him neglect everything. He would much have preferred an
indolent life to the possession of all empires and kingdoms. In his
life he never opposed the king's wishes, and he was as submissive as
anybody to the Maintenon. Those who assert that he would have retired
from Court had the king announced his marriage to the _guenipe_ did
not know him; he had himself a villanous _guenipe_ for mistress, whom
it was thought he had married secretly; her name was Mlle. Choin;
she is still in Paris. What prevented the old Maintenon from being
declared queen were the good reasons given against it to the king
by the Archbishop of Cambrai, M. de Fénelon; and that is why she
persecuted that good and respectable prelate till his death.
VERSAILLES, June, 1712.
I thank you for the share you take in my grief on account of the death
of the great personages whom we have lost,[8] and also on account of
the frightful calumnies that are being spread about against my son,
who is innocent. The fabricators of those lies are confounded, and now
ask pardon: but was it not horrible to invent such tales?
I cannot endure either tea, coffee, or chocolate; what would give me
pleasure is good beer-soup; but it cannot be procured here; beer in
France is worthless.
I hoped that, the king having taken medicine yesterday, H. M. would
not hunt to-day, and that I should thus have time to write you a
reasonable letter; but the demon of contretemps, as they say here, has
come and put himself against it. We hunted this morning, and I did not
get back to dinner till mid-day; I have answered my aunt and written
her fourteen sheets, so now I have but little time left before supper.
Happily for me I no longer like cards, for I am not rich enough to
risk my whole fortune as other people do, and I have no taste for
little stakes. Though I do not play, time does not seem long to me
when I am alone in my cabinet. I have quite a fine collection of gold
coins and medals; my aunt has given me others in silver and bronze;
I have two or three hundred engraved antique stones; also many brass
pieces which I like equally; I read with pleasure, and therefore I am
never bored, be the weather good or bad; I have always something to
do, and I write a great deal. When, in one day, I have written twenty
sheets to H. H. the Princess of Wales, ten or twelve to my daughter,
twenty in French to the Queen of Sicily [Anne-Marie, Monsieur's
daughter by Henrietta of England] I am so tired that I cannot put one
foot before the other.
MARLY, May, 1714.
We have lost the poor Duc de Berry, who was only twenty-seven years
old, and was stout and so healthy he ought to have lived a hundred
years. He shortened his life by his own imprudences--but I don't want
to talk of such sad matters; it makes me sick at heart and does no
good.
It is a good thing for me that he had ceased for several years to
love me, otherwise I could not be comforted for his loss. I own that
at first, and even for some days afterwards, I was greatly moved; but
having reflected that if I had died he would only have laughed, I
consoled myself promptly.
July, 1714.
I cannot express the grief into which I am plunged by the death of my
aunt [Sophia, Electress of Hanover, mother of George I. of England,
who had brought Madame up, being the sister of her father]; and I
have, besides, the misery of being forced to suppress my sorrow,
because the king cannot endure to see sad faces round him; I am
obliged therefore to hunt as usual.
II.
LETTERS OF 1714-1716.
FONTAINEBLEAU, 1714.
We are here since yesterday; having slept at the house of the Duc
d'Antin, called Petit-Bourg, a charming residence; the gardens,
especially, are magnificent. I did not come with the king, because
two days before leaving Versailles I caught a bad cold in my head
accompanied by a terrible cough, and I feared to disgust the king and
make the young people laugh by spitting and blowing my nose; so I came
in my own carriage with my ladies and dogs. Yesterday they hunted, but
I could not go; it used to be great pain to me to lose a hunt, but now
I do not care.
[Illustration: A Hunt at Fontainebleau]
You think my life is spent in pleasure-parties and amusements; to
undeceive you I will tell you just how my existence is regulated.
Usually I get up at nine o'clock; I go where you can guess; next,
I say my prayers and read three chapters in the Bible, one in the
Old Testament, one in the New, and a psalm; then I dress myself and
receive the visits of many of the Court people; at eleven I return to
my cabinet, where I read and write. At twelve I go to church; after
which I dine alone, which amuses me very little, for I think there is
nothing so tiresome as to be alone at table, surrounded by servants
who look at everything you put in your mouth; and besides, though I
have been here forty-three years, I have not yet accustomed myself
to the detestable cooking of this country. After my dinner, which is
usually over by a quarter to two, I return to my cabinet and rest
half an hour, and then I read and write till it is time for the king's
supper; sometimes my ladies play _ombre_ or _brelan_ beside my table.
Madame d'Orléans or the Duchesse de Berry, or sometimes my son, comes
to see me between half-past nine and ten. At a quarter to eleven we
take our places at table and wait for the king, who sometimes does not
come till half-past eleven; we sup without saying a word; then we pass
into the king's room, where we stay about the length of a Pater; the
king makes a bow and retires into his cabinet; we follow him,--though
_I_ have only done so since the death of the last dauphine; the king
talks with us; at half-past twelve he says good-night, and all retire
to their own apartments; I go to bed; Mme. la Duchesse plays cards,
the game lasting all night till the next day. When there is comedy I
go to it at seven o'clock, and thence to the king's supper; when there
is hunting it is always at one o'clock; then I get up at eight and go
to church at eleven.
I have seen Lord Peterborough twice; he said the oddest things; he has
got a mind like the devil, but a very strange head, and he talks in a
singular way. He said, in speaking of the two kings of Spain, "We are
great fools to let ourselves be killed for two such boobies."
I am really vexed that that old and odious Duchesse de Zell should
still be living, whereas our dear electress is dead already.
You probably have heard of the taking of Barcelona. I approve of the
people being faithful to a master so long as he shows himself worthy
of their affection; but when he abandons them it would be better not
to shed so much blood, and to submit peaceably. But those cursèd monks
are afraid they cannot live as they choose and be respected as much as
they have been under a king of France, and so they preached up and
down the streets that Barcelona must not be surrendered. If my advice
were followed they would put those rascals in the galleys, instead of
the poor Reformers who are languishing there.
October, 1714.
This is, unhappily, the last letter that I shall write you from my
dear Fontainebleau; we leave Wednesday, and on Monday our last hunt
will take place in the beautiful forest. I feel that the fine air and
exercise do me much good; they disperse and drive away sad thoughts,
and nothing is so counter to my health as sadness. Last Thursday we
hunted a stag that was rather malicious; but one gentleman slipped
round a rock behind him and wounded him in the shoulder, so that not
being able to butt with his head he was no longer dangerous. Behind
my calèche was another carriage in which were three priests,--the
Archbishop of Lyons and two abbés; fearing to be attacked by the stag
two of them jumped out and flung themselves flat on their stomachs on
the ground. I am sorry I did not see that scene, which would have made
me laugh, for we old hunters are not so afraid of a stag.
As for what concerns our king in England [George I.] I find it hard
to rejoice in his elevation, for I would not trust the English with a
hair of my head. I have seen recently what the fine talk of my Lord
Peterborough is worth. I wish that our elector, instead of becoming
King of England, had been made Roman Emperor, and that the King of
England who is here were in possession of the kingdom to which he has
a right. I fear that those English, who are so inconstant, will do
something before long which will not be to our liking. No one ever
became king in a more brilliant manner than King James, being crowned
amid cries of joy from the whole nation; yet his people persecuted him
so pitilessly that he could scarcely find a spot in which to rest
after countless sufferings. If one could only trust the English I
should say that it was well for the parliament to be over King George;
but when one reads about the revolutions of the English one sees
what eternal hatred they feel to kings, and also their inconstancy.
The English cannot endure each other; we saw that at the Court of
Saint-Germain; they lived there like cats and dogs. I never heard of
that philosopher Spinoza; was he a Spaniard? the name sounds Spanish.
King George sent me word by M. Martini that as soon as he reached
England he should write to me and keep up a correspondence. Yesterday
M. Prior brought me a letter from the king, but it was written by a
secretary and not by his own hand. I should not have expected that
after the compliment by M. Martini; but I ought not to feel astonished
when I think what that king has always been to me--just the reverse of
his mother. Whatever happens, I shall ever remember that he is the son
of my aunt, and I shall wish him all sorts of prosperity, as I have
to-day written to him. The Princess of Wales grieves me; I esteem her
sincerely, for I find the best sentiments in her--a rare thing at the
present day.
VERSAILLES, 1715.
Yesterday great news arrived about the Princesse des Ursins,--she who
has so long governed Spain, and who had gone to meet the new queen,
whose _camarera-mayor_ she expected to be. Her pride has ruined her;
she had written letters against the young queen, to whom they were
shown. When she went to meet the queen she would only go half-way down
the staircase; then she criticised her dress, and blamed her for being
so long upon the road, and said that if she had been in the king's
place she might have sent her back.[9] Thereupon the queen ordered an
officer of the body-guard to take that crazy woman out of her presence
and arrest her, and at the same time she sent a courier to the king,
making great complaints of the lady. The king answered that she could
do what she liked in the matter. So at eleven o'clock at night the
princess was put into a carriage with a single maid, lacqueys, and
guards, and orders were given to take her to France, which was done.
I cannot pity her, for she has always persecuted my son in a horrible
manner; she persuaded the king and queen (the one that is dead) that
my son wanted to dethrone them and was conspiring against their lives;
which is so false that, do what she could, she was unable to justify
her accusations, no matter how slightly, in the eyes of the world. For
this reason I do not afflict myself at what has happened to her, and
that is natural. I am uneasy lest that malignant devil should come
here, for she would not fail to fling her poison on my son and on me,
from which may God preserve us! I will tell you later whatever happens
in regard to that old woman.
We have just received the sad news of the death of the Archbishop of
Cambrai [Fénelon]. He is much regretted. He was a great friend to my
son. Also the good Maréchal de Chamilly, who was a very brave and
worthy man, died two days ago [The Marquis de Chamilly; to him were
addressed the famous "Portuguese Letters"].
There is nothing new here. Everybody is talking of the Persian
ambassador who made his entry yesterday, February 6, into Paris. He
is the oddest-looking being that was ever seen. He has brought a
soothsayer with him, whom he consults on all occasions to know if
days and hours are lucky or unlucky. If it is proposed to him to do
anything and the day does not prove to be a lucky one, he flies into a
fury, grinds his teeth, draws his sabre and his dagger, and wants to
exterminate everybody. But I am called to go to church and I cannot
tell you more just now.
April, 1715.
To-day I am, as they say in our dear Palatinate, as cross as a
bed-bug; and I will give you one specimen. The king, wishing to reward
the Princesse des Ursins, who has behaved so horribly to my son,
trying to make him out a poisoner, has given her a pension of 40,000
francs. There are two other things that have put me out of temper,
which are not worth more than that. Such injustices disgust one with
life; but we must hold our tongue and never say what we think.
After dinner my grandson, the Duc de Chartres, came to see me, and
I gave him an entertainment suited to his years: it was a triumphal
car drawn by a big cat, in which was a little bitch named Andrienne;
a pigeon served as coachman, two others were the pages, and a dog
was the footman and sat behind. His name is Picard; and when the
lady got out of the carriage Picard let down the steps. The cat is
named Castille. Picard also allows himself to be saddled; we put a
doll on his back and he does all that a circus horse would do. I have
also a bitch, whom I call Badine, who knows the cards and will bring
whichever I tell her--but enough of such nonsense.
England certainly owes much to the Duchess of Portsmouth. She is the
best woman of that class that I ever saw in my life; she is extremely
polite and is very agreeable company. In the days of Monsieur we often
had her at Saint-Cloud; so I know her very well.
You cannot be surprised, my dear Louise, if I often have reason to be
sad; for you must have read the long letter I sent to my aunt, our
dear electress, by the hands of M. de Wersebé. The rancour that the
_vilaine_ has against me will end only with her life; all that she can
imagine to do me harm and grieve me she never omits. She is more angry
with me now than ever because I would not see her great friend whom
the Queen of Spain dismissed. My son had begged me not to see her,
because she has a furious enmity against him and tried to make him
out a poisoner. He has not been contented with proving his innocence;
he has insisted that all the documents of the inquiry should be taken
to Parliament and preserved there. It is therefore very natural that
I should refuse to see such a woman; but the _vilaine_ is angry--for
like meets like, as the devil said to the coal-heaver. So I must take
patience, and not look as if I resented the wrongs done to us.
This morning, as I was washing my hands, my son came into my room and
made me a very fine present. He gave me seventeen antique gold coins,
as fresh as if they had just come out of the mint. They were found
near Modena, as you may have read in the Holland Gazette; he had them
secretly carried to Rome. This attention on his part has given me the
greatest pleasure,--not so much for the value of the present as for
the attention.
As soon as I return to Versailles I will have a copy made of my
portrait by Rigaud, who has seized my likeness in a wonderful manner;
you will then see, my dear Louise, how old I have grown.
VERSAILLES, August 15th, 1715.
Our king is not well, and that worries me to the point of being half
ill myself; I have lost both sleep and appetite. God grant I be
mistaken, for if what I fear should happen it would be the greatest
misfortune I could meet with. Were I to explain to you all that, you
would see; it is so abominable that I cannot think of it without
becoming goose-flesh. Say nothing to any one in England of what I have
now said to you, but I am very anxious about it.
Mme. de Maintenon has not been ill; she is fresh and in good health;
would to God that our king were as well, and then I should be less
troubled than I am.
August 27th.
MY DEAR LOUISE,--I am so troubled that I do not know any longer what
I do or what I say; and yet I must answer your kind letter as best
I can. I must first tell you we had yesterday the saddest and most
touching scene that can be imagined. The king, after preparing himself
for death, after having received the sacraments, had the dauphin
brought to him, gave him his benediction, and talked to him. He sent
for me next, also for the Duchesse de Berry and all his daughters and
grandchildren. He bade me farewell in words so tender that I wonder I
did not fall down senseless. He assured me that he had always loved
me and more than I knew, and that he regretted to have sometimes
caused me grief. He asked me to remember him sometimes, adding that
he thought I should do so willingly, for he was certain I had always
loved him. He said also that he gave me his blessing and offered
prayers for the happiness of my whole life. I threw myself on my knees
and, taking his hand, I kissed it. He embraced me and then he spoke to
the others. He told them that he urged harmony among them. I thought
he said that to me, and I answered that for that object as for all
else I would obey him as long as I lived. He smiled and said: "It is
not for you that I said that; I know you do not need such urging; I
said it for the other princesses."
You can believe in what a state all this has put me. The king has
shown a firmness beyond all expression; he gave his orders as if about
to start on a journey. He said farewell to all his servants, and
recommended them to my son, and made him regent, with a tenderness
that penetrated the soul through and through. I think I shall be the
next person in the royal family to follow the king if he dies; in the
first place, on account of my advanced age, and next because as soon
as the king is dead they are going to take the young king to Vincennes
and we shall all go to Paris, where the air is so very bad for me.
I shall have to stay there in mourning, deprived of fresh air and
exercise, and, according to all appearance, I shall fall ill. It is
not true that Mme. de Maintenon is dead. She is in perfect health in
the king's chamber, which she never leaves either day or night.
If the king dies, and there is no means of doubting it, it will be
to me a misfortune of which you can form no just idea; and that
because of certain reasons which must not be written down. I see
nothing before me but misery and wretchedness. Residence in Paris is
intolerable to me.
September 6th.
It is long since I have written to you, but it was impossible I should
do so. The king died Sunday last, at nine o'clock in the morning. You
can believe that I have had many visits to make and receive, and that
I have received and written many letters. I am extremely troubled
both by the loss of the king and by the fact that I must go and live
in that cursèd Paris. If I spend a year there I shall be horribly
ill; for that reason I want to quit it as soon as I can and go to
Saint-Cloud. All this worries me much, but complaining does no good.
I am very frank and very natural, and I say out all that I have in my
heart. I must tell you that it is a great consolation to me to see
the whole people, the troops and parliament rallying to my son and
publicly proclaiming him regent. His enemies, who plotted round the
death-bed of the king, are now disconcerted, and their cabal has lost
ground. But my son takes these matters so much to heart that he has no
rest either day or night; I fear he may fall ill, and many sad ideas
come into my head, but I must not tell them.
My son has pronounced a speech in Parliament and they tell me he did
not speak badly. The young king is very delicate; the ministers who
governed under the late king keep their places, and as there is no
doubt that they are quite as curious as they ever were, letters will
continue to be opened. It is quite impossible that I should keep my
health in Paris, for what preserved it was fresh air and exercise,
hunting, and walking. But I ought to learn to resign myself to the
will of God; the frightful wickedness and falseness of this world
disgust me with life; I cannot hope to make the people love me--I am
called to sit down to table, so I cannot read over my letter; excuse
its faults.
PARIS, September 10th, 1715.
Here we are in this sad town. Last night I spent in weeping, and have
given myself a bad headache. My son has given me a new apartment which
is, beyond comparison, much superior to the old one; but I am always
uncomfortable here. This morning I began to write, but could only
accomplish a few lines, I have such a fearful crowd of people about
me, and my head aches so that I know not what I write or what I do.
Yesterday they took the late king to Saint-Denis. The royal household
is dispersed; the young king was taken yesterday to Vincennes; Mme. de
Berry went to Saint-Cloud; my son's wife and I came here; and my son
came too, after accompanying the king to Vincennes; I don't know where
the others have gone.
I am not surprised, my dear Louise, that the king's death touched your
heart; but what I wrote you was nothing to what we saw and heard.
The king, of himself, was kind and just. But the old woman ruled him
so completely that he did nothing except by her will and that of the
ministers; he had no confidence in any but her and his confessor; and
as the good king was very little educated, the Jesuits and the old
woman on one side, and the ministers on the other, made him, between
them, do exactly as they pleased,--the ministers being, for the most
part, creatures of the old _vilaine_. So I can say with truth that all
the evil that was done was not the king's own act; he was misled and
imposed upon.
Yesterday they took the young king to parliament for his first _lit de
justice_. The regency of my son was enregistered; so now it is a sure
and certain thing.
I know that my son wants me to find pleasure in living here; but it
is not in his power to make it so. I wish I could have a fever; for I
have promised not to leave Paris unless I am ill, and headaches, which
I am sure to have as long as I am here, will not count; but as soon as
I have a fever I can return to my dear Saint-Cloud. My son has many
other things to do than to think of my pleasures and conveniences.
He greatly needs that we should pray to God for him; he seems to me
resolved to follow the king's last orders and live in amity with his
relations. I think that anything he directs himself will go well; but
many things must, necessarily, escape his direction. To show that he
does not wish to govern without other law than his own caprice, he
has already created various councils,--one for civil affairs, one for
ecclesiastical matters; there is also a council for foreign affairs,
and for war. He can do nothing but what has already been decided
upon in those councils; it is difficult to believe that the council
on ecclesiastical matters, which is composed of priests, will be
favourable to the Reformers. I am quite determined not to meddle in
anything. France has too long, to its sorrow, been governed by women;
I will not, so far as concerns me, give a handle to any one to lay
that blame on my son; and I hope that my example may open his eyes,
and that he will not allow himself to be ruled by any woman.
Saint-Cloud is to me a spot of enchantment; and with good reason, for
there is not in the world a more delightful residence. But if I had
gone there, as I wished, all Paris would have detested me, and out
of consideration for my son, I was bound to abstain from going. Do
not think, dear Louise, that the king's death has rendered me, as I
desired, freer in my actions; we are forced to live according to the
customs of the country, and are in no wise masters of our own conduct.
In my situation, one is truly the victim of greatness, and one must
be resigned to do that for which we have no inclination. Do not be
grateful to me for writing to you in the midst of my troubles; nothing
soothes the heart so much as to tell our griefs to those we love, who
give to our afflictions a real sympathy.
It is true that everybody thought the king dead when Mme. de
Maintenon left him; but he had only lost consciousness for a time,
and afterwards recovered it. I do not want to say anything more about
these sad matters, which affect me cruelly. The king showed the
greatest firmness up to his last moment. He said to Mme. de Maintenon,
smiling: "I have always heard it said that it was difficult to die; I
assure you that I find it very easy." He remained twenty-four hours
without speaking to any one; but during that time he prayed and
repeated constantly: "My God, have pity upon me; Lord, I am waiting to
appear before you; why do you not take me, my God?" He then repeated
with much fervour the Lord's prayer and the Creed, and he died
recommending his soul to God.
September 17th, 1715.
Parliament has recognized my son's rights to the regency, rights which
his birth bestowed upon him indisputably. The king had told him he had
made a will in which he would find nothing to complain of; and yet
that will is found to be wholly in favour of the Duc du Maine; it is
not therefore difficult to divine who dictated it--but do not let us
talk of it.
My son has too often heard me speak of you not to know you and
appreciate you, and he bids me offer you his affectionate compliments.
The duties with which he is charged are far from easy; he finds
everything left in a very miserable state; time is necessary to
repair the situation; nothing presents itself that is not care and
trouble, and for my son, as for me, the future does not appear under
flattering colours. More than forty placards attacking him have been
posted in Paris, and the dukes and peers are caballing against him in
Parliament; but my son is so beloved by the people and the troops that
his enemies are having their trouble for their pains, and all they get
is the shame of it. I admit, however, that I am very uneasy in seeing
him the target of so much animosity.
Ah! my dear Louise, you do not know this country. They laud my son to
the skies, but only for the purpose, each man for himself, of getting
some profit from it; fifty persons want the same office, and as it
can only be given to one, forty-nine malcontents are made, who become
rabid enemies. My son works so hard from six in the morning till
midnight that I fear his health will suffer.
October, 1715.
I have been to Saint-Cloud while the Duchesse de Berry came here.
Between ourselves, I wish to have nothing to do with her; we do not
sympathize. I live politely with her, as I would with a stranger, but
I do not see her often, and I will not concern myself with anything
that she does, or that her mother and her sisters do; I busy myself
about my own affairs. The Court is not what it is in Germany, and no
longer what it was in the days of Monsieur, when we dined together,
and all of us met every evening in the state salons. In these days we
live apart; my son takes his meals alone; I the same; his wife the
same; she is so lazy she is never able to resolve at a given moment to
do the slightest thing; she lies on a sofa all day, and Mme. de Berry
follows that example at the Luxembourg; so you see, my dear Louise,
that there cannot be any Court. Ah! you do not know the French; as
long as they hope to obtain what they want they are charming; but out
of fifty aspirants, forty-nine enemies are made, who cabal and play
the devil. I know the Court and State too well to rejoice for a moment
that my son is regent.
I have kept the word I gave you, and have earnestly entreated for the
poor Reformers who are at the galleys; I have obtained a promise--but
just now _No_ is said to none. I do not know what my son may have said
to Lord Stair about the Reformers, but I can assure you that when I
spoke to him he gave me good hope, saying at the same time that there
were very strong reasons which prevented him from doing the thing
promptly.
In the days of Cardinal Mazarin they wrote horrible books against
him. He appeared much irritated, and sent for all the copies as if
he intended to burn them up. When he had got them all he sold them
secretly and made ten thousand crowns out of them. Then he laughed and
said: "The French are pretty fellows; as long as I let them sing and
write, they will let me do just as I choose."
Mme. de Maintenon is at Saint-Cyr, in the institution which she
founded herself. She was never the king's mistress, but something much
higher. She was governess to Mme. de Montespan's children, and from
that she got a footing in salons, but she went much farther. The devil
in hell cannot be worse than she has been; her ambition has flung all
France into wretchedness. La Fontanges was a good girl; I knew her
well; she was one of my maids-of-honour, handsome from head to foot,
but she had no judgment.
I think that many people will declare themselves against King George,
for the Chevalier de Saint-George has gone to Scotland. They told me
to-night the details of his departure. He was at Commercy with the
Prince de Vaudemont and was hunting a stag. After the hunt they sat at
supper till midnight. On retiring to his chamber he said he was tired,
and told his servants to let him sleep till he called them. Two hours
after noon, as he gave no sign of life, his servants were frightened;
entering his apartment and not finding him in his bed, they ran in
terror with the news to the Prince de Vaudemont. The latter behaved as
if he knew nothing, and said that a search must be made immediately.
At the end of an hour the prince ordered all the portcullises
raised, so that no one was able to leave the château for three days.
During this time the chevalier reached Bretagne, and jumped into a
fishing-boat which took him out to a Scotch vessel in which there were
several lords, with whom he went to Scotland. If to-morrow I hear
anything new about this, and do not die in the course of the night, I
will tell you more.
No one knows what will be the result of the affair, but I am pained
for both rivals. King George is the son of my dear aunt, the
electress, which makes him as dear to me as if he were my own child.
On the other hand the Pretender is also my relation; he is the best
man in the world; on all occasions he and the queen, his mother, have
shown me the greatest friendship. I cannot wish harm to either the one
or the other.
I ought to tell you that it would be sovereignly unjust on the part
of Lord Stair to accuse my son of conniving in the flight of the
Chevalier. How could he know what happened at Commercy, or guess that
the Pretender was going incognito to Bretagne? My son did not know
it for a week; when he heard it the affair was over. The Chevalier
de Saint-George is the best and most polite man in the world. He
asked Lord Douglas: "What can I do to win the sympathy of my people?"
Douglas answered: "Embark, take a dozen Jesuits with you, and as soon
as you arrive, hang them publicly; nothing will please the people like
that."
M. Leibnitz, to whom I sometimes write, assures me that I do not write
German badly; this has given me great pleasure, for I should not like
to forget my mother tongue.
The third daughter of Mme. d'Orléans, Louise-Adélaïde, is well
brought up and is not ugly. She firmly persists in being a nun; but I
think she has no vocation for it. I do my best to turn her from the
notion; but she has always had this folly in her head. She has very
pretty hands and a skin that is naturally white and pink.
Mme. d'Orléans has had six daughters. The first died when she was
two years old; the second is the Duchesse de Berry; the third is
seventeen, they call her Mlle. de Chartres, and it is she who wants to
be a nun; she is the prettiest of them all both in face and figure;
the fourth is Charlotte-Aglaé, Mlle. de Valois; she will be fifteen
in October. Then comes the Duc de Chartres, who is twelve in August.
The fifth girl, Louise-Élisabeth, Mlle. de Montpensier, who is in a
convent at Beauvais, was six on the eleventh of this month;[10] and
finally Mlle. de Beaujolais, who is only a year old; Mme. d'Orléans is
again pregnant. No one ever thought of marrying Mlle. de Chartres to
the Chevalier de Saint-George; it is true that it was rumoured about,
but the persons whom it concerned never thought of it.
Mme. d'Orléans is not of my opinion as regards her daughters; she
would like to have them all nuns. She is not stupid enough to fancy
that that would take them to heaven; but she desires it from pure
laziness; for she is the laziest woman in the world, and she is
afraid, if she has them near her, of the trouble of bringing them up.
So she does not trouble herself about them; she lets them quarrel
and do what they like. All that is without my approbation; and they
must get out of it as they can. I am convinced that Mme. d'Orléans'
ailments and weaknesses come from the fact that she is always in bed
or on a sofa; she eats and drinks lying down. It is pure indolence in
her. That is why we cannot take our meals together. She has not spoken
to me since the death of the king.
Mme. de Berry is red. When she wishes to please she ought to talk, for
she has natural eloquence. She keeps around her those who constantly
deceive her. I say nothing to her now; she has intelligence, but
has been very ill brought up. I no longer consider her as one of my
grandchildren; she goes her way, and I go mine; I do not concern
myself with her, nor she with me.
PARIS, 1716.
There never were two brothers so different as the late king and
Monsieur; and yet they loved each other much. The king was tall
with fair hair, or rather a light-brown; he had a manly air and an
extremely fine face. Monsieur was not disagreeable in appearance, but
he was very small, his hair was black as jet, the eyebrows thick and
brown, with large dark eyes, a very long and rather narrow face, a
big nose, a very small mouth, and shocking teeth; he had the manners
of a woman rather than those of a man; he did not like either horses
or hunting; he cared for nothing but cards, holding a court, good
eating, dancing, and dressing himself; in a word, he took pleasure
in all that women like. The king loved hunting, music, the theatre;
Monsieur liked nothing but great assemblies and masked balls; the
king liked gallantry with women; but I do not believe that in all his
life Monsieur was ever in love. He was so fond of the sound of bells
that he always went to Paris to spend All Saints night expressly to
hear them ring as they do there the livelong night. He laughed about
it himself, but declared that ringing gave him the greatest pleasure.
I never let him go anywhere alone, except by his express orders.
Monsieur was very devout; but he was brave. The soldiers in the army
used to say of him: "He is more afraid of sun and dust than he is of
guns," and that was very true. The Chevalier de Lorraine was a wicked
man, but the rest of his dear friends were no better. Some years
before the late Monsieur's death he begged my forgiveness.
My son has studied much, he has a good memory, he seizes everything
with facility. He does not resemble either his father or his mother.
Monsieur had a long, narrow face, whereas my son has a square one. His
walk is like that of Monsieur, and he makes the same motions with his
hands. Monsieur had a very small mouth and villanous teeth; my son
has a large mouth and beautiful teeth. He is too prejudiced in favour
of his own nation. Though he sees every day how false and deceitful
his compatriots are, he firmly believes there are no people on earth
to be compared with the French.
I assure you that everything passed in all honour between my son and
the Queen of Spain. I do not know whether he had the good fortune to
please the queen, but he never was in love with her. He says she has
a good expression, and a fine figure, but that neither her features
nor her manners are to his taste. I certainly cannot deny that he is a
lover of women; but he has his caprices, and everybody does not please
him. The grand style suits him less than the dissipated, loose ways of
the opera-dancers. I often ridicule him for it.
Our little king is now in the Tuileries in perfect health; he has
never been really ill; he is very lively, and does not keep in one
position for a single instant. To tell you the truth, he is very badly
brought up; they let him do just what he likes for fear of making
him ill. I am convinced that if they corrected him he would be less
quick-tempered; and they do him great harm by letting him follow his
caprices. But everybody wants to gain the good graces of a king, no
matter how young he is.
Mme. la Duchesse learned from her mother and her aunt [Mmes. de
Montespan and de Thiange] to turn people into ridicule; they never did
anything else; everybody was a butt for their satire under pretext of
amusing the king. The children, who were always there, never knew or
heard aught else. It was a bad school, but not so dangerous as that
of the children's governess; for the latter went seriously to work,
without any intention of amusing, and told the king all sorts of evil
of everybody, under pretence of religion and charity and reforming the
neighbour. In this way the king was given a bad opinion of the whole
Court, and the old woman was able to prevent the king from liking
to be with any others than herself and her creatures--they were the
only perfect beings, exempt from all faults. This was really the more
perilous because _lettres de cachet_ sending persons to prison or
exile, followed on such denunciations,--things which Mme. de Montespan
never procured. When she had well laughed at any one she was satisfied
and went no further.
Mme. la Duchesse has three charming daughters; one of them, Mlle.
de Clermont, is very beautiful, but I think her sister, the young
Princesse de Conti, is much more agreeable. The mother is not more
beautiful than her daughters, but she has more grace, a better
countenance, and more engaging ways; wit sparkles in her eyes, also
malice. I always say she is like a pretty cat which lets you feel
her claws even while she plays. She laughs at everybody; but is very
amusing, and turns things into ridicule in such a pleasant way that
you can't help laughing. She is very good company,--always gay, and
makes the liveliest sallies; she is very insinuating, and when she
wants to please a person she can take all shapes; in her life she
never was out of temper, and if she is false (as she really is) there
never was any one more agreeable; she knows how to adapt herself to
every one's humour, and you would think she had a genuine sympathy for
those to whom she shows it, but you must not trust her.
PARIS, 1716.
Cardinal de Noailles is certainly a virtuous cardinal of great merit,
which all cardinals are not. We have four here, each different. Three
have this in common, that they are all as false as gibbet-wood, but
in face and temper they are quite different. Cardinal de Polignac is
well-bred; he has capacity; he is insinuating, his voice is soft;
he is too much given to politics and sycophancy, which makes him
commit the faults for which people blame him. Cardinal de Rohan has
a fine face, like his mother [Mme. de Soubise, one of Louis XIV.'s
mistresses], but he has no figure; he is vain as a peacock, full
of whims, intriguing, a slave to the Jesuits; he thinks he governs
everything, but really governs nothing; he believes that he is
without an equal in this world. Cardinal de Bissy is ugly; he has the
face of a clumsy peasant; he is proud, malignant, and false; more
dissimulating than any one imagines; a sickening flatterer, you see
his falseness in his eyes; he has capacity, but uses it only to do
harm. These three cardinals could put the Noailles in a sack and sell
him without his knowing it, as the proverb says; they are all three
far more shrewd than he. Bissy and Tartuffe are as like as two drops
of water; Bissy has just Tartuffe's manners.
Wolves are going about in bands of eight and ten and attacking
travellers; the extreme severity of the cold is the reason of this;
it is causing great misfortunes. In Paris eight poor washerwomen were
at work on a boat; the ice cut the rope like a razor; the boat was
crushed into bits; one of the women had the presence of mind to jump
from one cake of ice to another, and they had time to throw her a rope
and save her; but all the others perished. The head of one was cut off
by the ice, and the body of another was cut through; that was an awful
thing, and what made it more terrible was that the woman was pregnant,
and when the ice cut her open the head of a child appeared. What can
be imagined more dreadful than that!
PARIS, 1716.
I had completely won my husband during the last three years of his
life; I had brought him round to laugh with me at his weaknesses, and
to take what I said pleasantly without being irritated. He no longer
allowed any one to calumniate and attack me in his presence; he had a
just confidence in me; he always took my part. But previously to that
I had suffered horribly. I was just about to become happy when our
Lord God took away my poor husband, and I saw disappear in one instant
the result of all the cares and pains I had taken for thirty years to
make myself happy. I am subject to attacks of the spleen, and when
anything agitates me my left side swells up as big as a child's head.
I do not like to stay in bed; as soon as I wake I want to be up.
Three or four years before Monsieur's death I had, to please him,
been reconciled with the Chevalier de Lorraine; after which he did
me no more harm. The chevalier died so poor that his friends had
to pay for his burial. He had, however, an income of three hundred
thousand crowns; but he was a bad manager, and his people robbed him.
As long as they gave him a thousand pistoles for his gambling and
debauchery he let them dissipate and pillage his property as they
chose. La Grançay contrived to get a great deal of money out of him.
He came to a dreadful end. He was sitting with Mme. de Maré, sister
of Mme. de Grançay, and was telling her how he had passed the night
in debauchery, relating the utmost horrors, when he was struck with
apoplexy, lost his speech at once, and never recovered consciousness.
If I could have given my blood to prevent the marriage of my son
I would have done it; but after the thing was done I consulted
only concord. Monsieur felt much attachment to his daughter-in-law
during the first months, but after he imagined that she looked
with too favourable an eye on the Chevalier de Roye [Marquis de la
Rochefoucauld] he hated her like the devil. To prevent him from
bursting out I was obliged to represent to him daily with all my
strength that he would dishonour himself, and his son too, by making
a scene, which would lead to nothing but unhappiness with the king.
As no one had wished for that marriage less than I, my advice was
not suspicious; it was plain I spoke, not from attachment to my
daughter-in-law, but for the purpose of avoiding scandal and from love
of my son and his family. So long as an outburst could be prevented
the thing was at least doubtful to the eyes of the public; an opposite
behaviour would have given proof that it was true.
I am now satisfied with Mme. d'Orléans; she shows me great respect,
and I, too, do my best to please her in everything, and I live with
her now as politely as possible. She never could resolve to dine
with the king, her father, therefore she cannot take that pains for
me. She is always lying down when she eats, with a little table and
her favourite, the Duchesse Sforza, beside her. At mid-day my son is
always with her.
PARIS, 1716.
There is nothing surprising in the fact that the dauphin [the Duc de
Bourgogne] was in love with the dauphine. She had much intelligence
and was very agreeable when she chose to be. Her husband was devout
and rather melancholy in temperament, while she was always gay; that
served to animate him and disperse his gloom; and as he had a strong
liking for women (humpbacked persons always have), but was so pious
that he thought he committed a sin by looking at any other woman than
his wife, it is very simple that he was much in love with her. I have
seen him squint to make himself ugly when a lady told him he had
fine eyes; though it was not necessary, for the good soul was ugly
enough without endeavouring to make himself more so. He had a shocking
mouth, a sickly skin, was very short, humpbacked, and deformed. His
wife lived very well with him, but she did not love him; she saw him
as others did; and yet I think she was touched by the passion he had
for her; it is certain that no greater attachment could be than that
of the dauphin for his wife. He had many good qualities; he was very
charitable and helped great numbers of officers, though no one knew
it. At his birth the public rejoicings were universal. The dauphine
could make him believe whatever she liked; he was so in love with
her that whenever she looked favourably at him he went into ecstasy
and was quite beside himself. When the king scolded him he seemed so
distressed that the king was obliged to soften down. The old aunt
[Mme. de Maintenon] would also seem so troubled that the king had
enough to do to tranquillize her. In short, to get peace the king at
last left the old mistress to direct all such domestic matters, and no
longer concerned himself about them.
Nangis, who commanded the king's regiment, was not displeasing to the
dauphine, but he had more liking for the little La Vrillière. The
dauphin was fond of Nangis, and thought it was to please him that his
wife talked to Nangis; he was convinced that his favourite had gallant
relations with Mme. de La Vrillière.
My son is no longer a young man of twenty; he is forty-two, and
therefore they cannot pardon him in Paris for running after women
like a hare-brained youth when he has all the weighty affairs of the
kingdom on his hands. When the late king took possession of his crown
the kingdom was in a state of prosperity, and he could then very well
divert himself; but to-day it is not the same thing; my son must
work night and day to repair what the king, or rather, his faithless
ministers, ruined.
I cannot deny that my son has a great inclination for women; he has
now a sultana-queen, named Mme. de Parabère. Her mother, Mme. de la
Vieuville, was lady of the bed-chamber to the Duchesse de Berry, and
that is where he made her acquaintance. She is now a widow, with a
fine figure, tall and well-made; her skin is dark and she does not
paint; she has a pretty mouth, and pretty eyes, but very little mind;
she is a fine bit of flesh. My son has become alarmingly delicate; he
cannot kneel down without dropping over from weakness. When he drinks
too much he does not use strong liquors, only champagne; he does not
care for any other wine.
PARIS, 1716.
Cardinal de Richelieu, in spite of all his talent, used to have fits
of madness; he fancied sometimes he was a horse, and would gallop
round a billiard-table, neighing, and making a great noise for a hour,
and trying to kick his attendants. After that they would put him to
bed and cover him up to induce perspiration, and when he woke up he
had no recollection of what had happened.
The late king used to say: "I own I am piqued when I see that with
all my authority as king over this country, I have complained in
vain against those tall head-dresses; for not one person has shown
the least desire to please me by lowering them. And yet a stranger
arrives, an English nobody, with a flat cap, and suddenly all the
princesses have gone from one extreme to the other."
Mme. d'Orléans looks older than she is, for she puts on a great deal
of rouge, and her cheeks and nose are pendent; moreover the small-pox
has left her with a trembling of the head like that of an old woman.
She is so indolent she expects to have larks drop roasted into her
mouth, but as we do not live in a land where things are to be had for
the asking, that is past wishing for. She would like very well to
govern; but she does not understand true dignity, she is too badly
bred for that; she knows how to live as a simple duchess but not as a
grand-daughter of France.
My son's intentions are always good and upright; if some things happen
that ought not to be, they are certain to be the doing of some one
else. He is too easy and is not sufficiently distrustful; consequently
he is often deceived; for wicked people know his kindness and abuse
it shamefully. It is a fact that my son has enough education to keep
him from ever being bored; he knows music well, and composes, not
badly; he paints very prettily; he understands several languages, and
he likes to read; he is well-informed about chemistry and comprehends
without trouble very difficult sciences. And yet, all that does not
keep him from being bored by everything. I have reason myself to be
satisfied with him. He lives very well with me and gives me no ground
to complain of him. He pays me much attention, and I know few persons
in whom he has more confidence than he has in me.
In early days they always called me sister-pacificator, because I did
my best to keep the peace between Monsieur and his cousin la Grande
Mademoiselle, and also her sister, the Grand-duchess of Tuscany. They
quarrelled often, and like children, for the merest nonsense. Monsieur
was very jealous of his children; he kept them as much as he could
away from me; he let me have more authority over my daughter and the
Queen of Sicily than over my son; but he could not prevent me from
telling him plain truths. My daughter never in her life did anything
to cause me uneasiness.
Monsieur did not like hunting. He never could bring himself to mount
a horse--except at the wars. He wrote so badly that he frequently
brought me the letters he had written to get me to read them to him,
saying with a laugh, "You are so accustomed to my writing, madame, do
read that to me, for I don't know what I said." We often laughed over
this with all our hearts.
The Duc du Maine thought he could have married my daughter, but
certain merchants who were in Mme. de Montespan's apartment overheard
her speaking to Mme. de Maintenon of the marriage,--those ladies
thinking such common persons would not understand them. But the
merchants spoke up and said, "Mesdames, don't try that; it will cost
you your lives if you make that marriage." That prevented the thing;
for Mme. de Montespan was so frightened she went to the king and
begged him not to think of it any longer.
The King of Denmark, Frederick IV., seems to me rather a fool; he
wants to pass himself off as being in love with my daughter; in
dancing he presses her hand and rolls his eyes up to heaven; he
began a minuet at one end of the hall and ought to have ended it at
the other, but he stopped in the middle to be told what to do. That
distressed me for him; so I rose, took him by the hand, and led him
back to his place; I think without that he would be still in the same
spot. The good soul does not know what is and what is not the thing to
do.
The Pretender has been well received in Scotland and proclaimed king;
but I cannot tell you more, for we have very little news from England.
The Queen of England is so happy in hearing of her son's safe arrival
and good reception. The poor woman is not accustomed to rejoice; her
satisfaction has been so great that a fever which she had has passed
off. I know from a good source that the pope and the King of Spain
furnished the money for the Pretender. The pope gave thirty thousand
crowns, and the king three hundred thousand; as for my son, he did not
give a penny.
Religion used to be very reasonable in France before the old _guenipe_
reigned here; but she ruined everything and introduced all sorts of
silly devotions,--rosaries and such-like. If any persons wanted to
reason upon that matter she and the confessor sent them to prison or
exiled them. Those two caused all the persecutions that were levelled
in France against the poor Reformers and Lutherans. That Jesuit with
the long ears, Père La Chaise, began the work in union with the old
_guenipe_, and Père Tellier finished it; it was thus that France has
been utterly ruined.
The old woman was implacable, and when she had once taken a dislike to
any one it was for life, and that person became the object of a secret
persecution that never ceased. I experienced this; she laid many
traps for me, which I escaped by the help of God. She was dreadfully
weary of her old husband, who was always in her room. Some persons
assert that she poisoned Mansard; they say she discovered that Mansard
intended that very day to show certain papers to the king which
would prove how she had made money from the post without the king's
knowledge. Never in his life did the king hear of this adventure, nor
of that of Louvois, because no one was inclined to be poisoned--that
kept all tongues respectful.
Long before his death the king was entirely converted and no longer
ran after women; when he was young the women ran after him; but
he renounced all that sort of life when he imagined that he became
devout. The real truth was that the old witch watched him so closely
he dared not look at a woman; she disgusted him with society, to have
him and govern him alone, and this under pretence of taking care of
his soul. She controlled him so well that he even exiled the Duchesse
de la Ferté who posed as being in love with him. When that duchess
could not see him she had his portrait in her carriage, in order to
look at him constantly. The king said she made him ridiculous, and
sent her an order to go and live on her estates. It was suspected,
however, that the Duchesse de Roquelaire, of the family of Laval, had
made a conquest of the king; certainly his Majesty was not angry about
her as he was with the Duchesse de la Ferté. Gossip had a great deal
to say about this intrigue, but I never put my nose into it.
PARIS, 1716.
A Frenchman, a refugee in Holland, used to write to me how the affairs
of the Prince of Orange were going. I thought that I should do the
king a service in communicating to him what I thus heard; I did so.
The king was much obliged and thanked me; but in the evening he said,
laughing: "My ministers insist that you are ill-informed; they say
there is not a word of truth in what was written to you." I answered:
"Time will show who is best informed, your ministers, or the person
who wrote to me; my intentions were good, monsieur." Some time later,
after it was proved that King William had gone to England, M. de
Torcy came to me and said that I ought to inform him of the news I
received. I replied: "You assured the king that I received false news;
on which I ordered that nothing more should be written to me; for I
do not like to spread false reports." He laughed, as he usually did,
and said: "Your news is always very good." To which I answered: "A
great and able minister must have surer news than I, for he knows all
things." That evening the king said to me: "You have been ridiculing
my ministers." I replied: "I only returned them what they gave."
III.
LETTERS OF 1717-1718.
PARIS, 1717.
M. le dauphin [Monseigneur] never really loved or hated, but he was
malicious; his greatest pleasure was in giving pain; when he had a
trick to play on any one he began by treating them graciously. In
every respect he had the most inconceivable character that could be
imagined. When one thought him angry he was often in the best humour;
when he seemed content he was cross; never could we guess correctly.
He had not heart enough to know what true friendship was; he loved
only those persons who procured him amusement, and disliked all
others. For over twenty years, as long as he was in the hands of the
_grande_ Princesse de Conti,[11] I was on very good terms with him
and he had great confidence in me; but after he passed into those of
Mme. la Duchesse he completely changed. He behaved as if he had never
seen or known me in his life, and as, after Monsieur's death, I never
hunted with his Highness I had very few relations with him to his
death. If he had had good sense he would have preferred the Princesse
de Conti to Mme. la Duchesse, for she had a much better heart; she
loved him unselfishly, whereas the other loved nothing in the world,
and thought only of her pleasures, her interests, and her ambition. As
long as she attained her ends she cared very little for the dauphin,
who gave clear proof of his weak-mindedness by his dependence upon
her.
When the King of Spain [his son, the Duc d'Anjou] departed the king
wept bitterly, and the dauphin too, but he had previously never given
to any of his sons the slightest sign of attachment. He never had them
in his apartments morning or evening; when he was not hunting he was
always in those of the Princesse de Conti, or, later, in those of Mme.
la Duchesse. No one would ever have guessed that the sons were his; he
treated them as strangers and never called them "my son," always "M.
le Duc de Bourgogne," "M. le Duc d'Anjou," "M. le Duc de Berry;" and
they called him "Monseigneur."
He lived very well with his wife for two or three years; that is to
say, as long as the old woman was satisfied with the dauphine; but
as soon as there came a little coolness between them she set herself
to make the dauphin believe that his wife did not love him, that she
cared only for Bessola [her maid], and that everybody thought him a
fool for spending his time in a room where more German was talked
than French. He was told also that Bessola was the confidante of the
dauphine's gallantries, and helped her to make pleasure-parties with
the maids-of-honour. I heard all these details from the dauphine
herself [Marie-Anne-Victoire of Bavaria], for her husband, who still
loved her, related them to her. But the old witch returned so often
to the charge, and gave the dauphin so many opportunities, that he
finally became enamoured of Mlle. de Rambure, afterwards Mme. de
Polignac, and as soon as that amour began all his friendship for the
dauphine departed.
At times the dauphine was not ugly, when, for instance, she had a
fine colour. If she had not had such a passion for that faithless
Bessola, she might perhaps have been happy. But that woman, in order
to rule her and to maintain herself with the Maintenon, made the poor
princess the most wretched creature upon earth. She died tranquil and
resigned, but they sent her into another world as surely as if they
had put a pistol to her head. In giving birth to the Duc de Berry she
was so badly managed that she became deformed; before that she had a
very pretty figure. From that time she never had an hour's health. The
evening before her death, while the little Duc de Berry was sitting
on her bed, she said to him: "My dear Berry, I love you much, but you
have cost me dear." M. le dauphin was not affected. They had told him
so much harm of his wife that he did not care for her, and when he
muffled himself up in his great mourning-cloak he burst out laughing.
The old _guenipe_ hoped (as really happened) to govern the dauphin
through his mistresses, which she could not have done had he continued
to love his wife. That old woman had conceived such a terrible hatred
to the poor princess, that I believe she had given orders to Clément,
the _accoucheur_, to manage her ill. What confirms me in this idea is
that she nearly killed the dauphine by going to see her in perfumed
gloves; she afterwards said it was I who wore them, which was not true.
The dauphine often said to me: "We are both unhappy, but the
difference between us is that your Excellency endeavoured as much as
you possibly could to avoid your fate; whereas I did my best to come
here, and so I deserve what has happened to me." She loved the dauphin
as a husband, but more as if he were her son. They tried to make her
pass for crazy when she complained. An hour before her death she said
to me: "I shall prove to-day that I was not crazy when I complained
and said that I was ill." The old _guenipe_ sent her agents among the
populace to spread a rumour that the dauphine hated France and wanted
to create new taxes and lay burdens on the people.
[Illustration: The Dauphine wife of Monseigneur]
PARIS, 1717.
Though the late Monsieur received much property with me, I was obliged
to give it all up to him,--jewels, furniture, pictures, in short,
all that came to me from my family; and I really had not means to
live according to my rank and maintain my household, which is very
considerable. I have been ill-used in this respect, but it was rather
the fault of the Princess Palatine, who allowed my marriage-contract
to be so ill-drawn. All the Madames have had pensions from the king;
but as these are established on the old footing, they do not afford
sufficient means to reach the end of the year. I have been obliged to
cede my jewels to my son; otherwise I could not live as I should and
keep up my establishment, which is very large; but to do so is, to my
thinking, more commendable than to be decked with jewels.
I cannot see why people should have so many different garments. All I
have are either full-dress gowns, or my hunting habit for horseback.
I never in my life had a dressing-gown, and I have but one wrapper
[_robe de nuit_] in my wardrobe to go to bed and get up in.
I was very glad when the late Monsieur, after the birth of his
daughter, took a bed to himself, for I never liked the business of
making children. When his Highness made me the proposal I said: "Yes,
with all my heart, Monsieur; I shall be very glad of it, provided you
do not hate me and continue to be a little kind to me." He promised me
that, and we were always very well satisfied with each other.
It was very annoying to sleep with Monsieur; he could not endure that
any one should disturb his sleep; I was obliged to keep myself on the
very edge of the bed, so that sometimes I fell out like a sack. I was
therefore extremely pleased when Monsieur, in good friendship and
without bitterness, proposed that we should sleep in separate rooms.
I am like you; I cannot imagine that any one should remarry; there is
but one motive that I can conceive, and that is dying of hunger and
getting one's bread that way.
I never had but one hundred louis for cards until the death of my
mother; after Monsieur received the money of the Palatinate he doubled
that allowance.
The Maréchale de Villars runs after the Comte de Toulouse; my son
is also in her good graces, and he is not discreet. The Maréchal
de Villars came to see me one day, and as he assumes to know much
about medals he asked to see mine. Baudelot,[12] a very honourable
and learned man, who is in charge of them, was obliged to show them.
Baudelot is not the most discreet of men, and moreover he is little
informed as to what goes on at Court. So he made a dissertation on
one of my medals to prove, against the opinion of other savants, that
a head with horns which appears upon it is that of Pan, and not that
of Jupiter Ammon. To prove his erudition the worthy soul said to M.
de Villars, "Ah! monseigneur, here is one of the finest medals Madame
has; it is the triumph of Cornificius; he has all sorts of horns. He
was a great general like yourself, monseigneur; he has the horns of
Juno and of Faunus. Cornificius, as you know, monseigneur, was a very
able general." I interrupted him. "Go on," I said; "if you stop to
talk about each medal, you will not have time to show them all." But,
full of his subject, he replied: "Oh, Madame, this one is worth all
the rest. Cornificius is really one of the rarest medals on earth.
Consider it, Madame, look at it; here is a crowned Juno crowning that
great general." In spite of all I did, I could not prevent Baudelot
from harping on horns to the marshal. "Monseigneur knows all about
such things," he said, "and I want him to judge whether I am not right
in saying that those horns are the horns of Pan, and not of Jupiter
Ammon." Everybody in the room had all they could do not to laugh. If
it had been done on purpose it could not have been more complete. When
the marshal had gone, I laughed out; but I had the greatest difficulty
in convincing Baudelot that he had blundered.
PARIS, 1717.
It is certain that the Comtesse de Soissons, Angélique-Cunégonde,
daughter of François-Henri de Luxembourg, has much virtue and
capacity, though, like all the world, she has defects. One may say
of her indeed that she is a poor princess. Her husband, Louis-Henri,
Comte de Soissons, is very ugly. If her children had been like their
mother they would have been very handsome, for all her features are
fine; eyes, mouth, and lines of the face could not be better; her
nose is a little too large, and her skin not delicate. All her sons,
except Prince Eugène, have not been worth much, and any one who
resembles Eugène cannot be good-looking. When he was young he was
not so very ugly; but he has grown ugly in growing old; he never had
a fine countenance or the noble air; his eyes are not bad, but his
nose spoils his face; his teeth are too large and protrude from his
mouth; he is always dirty, and he wears greasy hair which he never
curls. I think a good deal of Prince Eugène, for he is not selfish.
He did a fine action: he left behind him here a great many debts;
after he entered the service of the emperor and acquired a fortune he
paid to the last farthing all that he owed, even to those who had no
bill or written engagement with him and never dreamed of being paid.
Therefore it is impossible that a man who acted with such loyalty
could have betrayed his master for money. The accusations of the
traitor Nimtsch are lies and the work of that devil of an Alberoni. I
see from the "Gazette of Vienna" which you sent me that Prince Eugène
does not intend to let so horrible an accusation drop, but will pursue
the Comte de Nimtsch to the death. That is right.
I thank you for the silver coin you send; it comes extremely _à
propos_. I have also the Doctor Luther in gold and in silver. I am
convinced that Luther would have done much better not to make a
separate Church, but to have confined himself to opposing the abuses
of the papacy; more good would have come from it.
To go back to what I was beginning to tell you on Wednesday--I assure
you that my son has more enemies than friends. His brother-in-law
[the Duc du Maine] and his wife are working with the greatest ardour
to rouse the hatred of the populace against him. Mme. du Maine is
circulating writings against him. The children of the Montespan come
of a malignant race.
The little king has a pretty face and much judgment, but he is a
spiteful child; he loves no one in the world but his governess, Mme.
de Ventadour; he takes aversions to people without any cause, and
likes to say the most wounding things to them. I am not in his good
graces, but that does not trouble me; for when he is of an age to
reign I shall not be in this world and dependent on his caprices. When
I advise my son to be on his guard against all these wicked people, he
only laughs and says: "You know, Madame, that we cannot avoid what God
has ordained for us throughout all time; therefore, if I am to perish
I cannot avoid it; therefore I shall do only what is reasonable for my
preservation, but nothing extraordinary."
[This is a favourable opportunity to reveal Madame's French spelling;
the letter is in German, but she quotes her son in French, as follows:
"Vous saves bien, Madame, qu'on ne peust Evitter ce que Dieu vous
a de tout temps destines; ainsi, sije le suis à perir, je ne Le
pourris Evitter; ainsi je feres que ce qui est raisonnable pour ma
Conservation, mais rien dextraordinaire."]
My son has studied much; he has a good memory; he expresses himself
well on all sorts of subjects; above all, he speaks extremely well in
public; but he is a man, he has his faults like others. They do harm
to himself only, for he is only too kind and good to other people. I
tell him every day he is too kind; he laughs and asks me if it is not
better to be kind than harsh. I don't know where he gets his great
patience; Monsieur had none, nor I either.
When he was fourteen or fifteen years of age he was not ugly; but
since then the sun of Italy and Spain so burned him that his skin
became a deep red. He is not tall, and yet he is stout, with fat
cheeks; his bad sight makes him squint, and his eyes protrude; and he
has a bad walk. And yet I do not think he is disagreeable-looking.
When he dances or rides on horseback he makes a good appearance; but
when he goes about in his usual way he does not appear to advantage.
Close by he sees very well, and can read the finest writing, but at
the distance of half the length of a room he recognizes no one without
spectacles. Though he talks well on matters of science or knowledge,
one can easily see that they give him no pleasure; on the contrary,
they bore him. I have often observed this to him; he admits that at
first he has the greatest desire to know a thing, but as soon as he
thoroughly knows what he studies it gives him no longer the least
satisfaction. I love him from the bottom of my heart, but I cannot
understand how women should be enamoured of him; for he has in no
way the manners of gallantry, and he is not discreet; besides, he is
incapable of feeling a passion and of being attached for any length
of time to the same person. On the other hand, his manners are not
polite or seductive enough to make him beloved. He is very indiscreet
and relates all that happens to him. I have told him a hundred times
that I am amazed that those women run after him so madly when I should
think they would rather run away from him. He laughs and says: "You
don't know the loose women of the present day. To say you have been
their lover pleases them."
PARIS, 1717.
I am very glad that my letters have reached you at last. M. de Torey
is no friend of mine; if he could find occasion to do me harm he
would not let it escape him; but I do not trouble myself about that.
My son knows me well; he knows how sincere my attachment to him is,
and it would be difficult to make us quarrel. There is no use in
sealing letters with wax; they have a species of composition, made
of quicksilver and other substances, which lifts the wax, and when
the letters have been opened, read, and copied, they seal them up so
adroitly that no one can perceive that they have been opened. My son
knows how to manufacture that composition; they call it _gama_. The
Queen of Sicily once wrote and asked me if I no longer walked with the
king, as in her day. I answered with these lines:--
"Those happy days are gone; the face of all is changed
Since to these parts the gods have brought
The daughter of the Cretan king and Pasiphaë."
Torey took them to the _guenipe_, as if I meant her--which was true
enough; and the king was sulky with me for a long time about it.
The late king contracted a great many debts because he would not
retrench his luxury in anything; and that has been the cause of great
malversations on the part of business men and their partisans; for
when one sou had been lent to the king they turned it by agreement
with their creatures into a pistole. Thanks to their rascality, on
which no check was put, they have enriched themselves, but the king,
and now the country, have been impoverished. My son works night and
day, with no thanks from anybody, to bring things back to a good
condition. He has many enemies, who pour out against him all sorts of
horrid threats, and do all they can to rouse the hatred of the people
against him; in which they succeed easily, especially because he is
no bigot. He is so little self-interested that he has never touched
a farthing of what comes to him as regent, although he has great
needs because of his numerous children. The young king has around him
persons who are very ill-disposed towards my son,--one especially,
though he is his brother-in-law; but he is also the falsest of
hypocrites. He has an air as if he would eat the very images of
saints, but he is none the less the most wicked man on earth. In the
days of the late king when that man flattered any one and spoke to
him kindly it was taken as a proof that he had played him some evil
trick. He contributed to get his mother sent away from Court so as to
please the old woman, and he was so anxious to prevent her return to
Versailles that he ordered her furniture turned out of doors, as it
were. You can imagine what a man of that nature is capable of doing. I
fear him for my son as I do the devil; and I think that my son is not
sufficiently on his guard against him. The old woman wants his life;
all that they say of that diabolical woman is below the truth.
When my son reproached the Maintenon quite gently for slandering him,
and asked her to look into her conscience, where she knew that what
she said were falsehoods, she replied: "I spread that rumour because I
believed it."
My son said: "No, you could not have believed it, for you knew the
contrary."
Thereupon she answered insolently (and I admired the patience of my
son): "Did not the dauphine die?"
"Could she not have died without me?" asked my son, "was she immortal?"
The old woman replied: "I was in such despair at her loss that I
blamed the person who they told me had caused it."
My son said to her, "But, madame, you knew of the report that was
rendered to the king; you knew that I had done nothing, and that Mme.
la dauphine was not poisoned at all."
"That is true," she replied, "I will say no more about it."
That humpback Fagon, the favourite of the old _guenipe_, used to say
that what displeased him in Christianity was that he could not raise a
temple to the Maintenon and an altar for her worship.
PARIS, 1717.
I have received to-day a great visit,--that of my hero, the czar
[Peter the Great]. I think he has very good manners, taking that
expression in the sense of the manners of a person without affectation
or ceremony. He has much judgment; he speaks bad German, but he makes
himself understood without difficulty, and he converses very well. He
is polite to everybody, and is much liked.
He went to Saint-Cyr and saw the old _guenipe_, who keeps herself
completely retired there; no one can say that she has meddled in
the slightest thing; which makes me think that woman has still some
project in her head, though I can't imagine what it can be. She used
to reproach me, and say it was a shame I had no ambition and never
took part in anything, and one day I answered: "If a person had
intrigued a great deal to become Madame, might she not be permitted
to enjoy that title in tranquillity? Imagine that to be my case, and
leave me in peace."
She said, "You are very obstinate."
I answered: "No, madame, but I like my peace and I regard your
ambition as pure vanity." I really thought she would burst her skin,
she was so angry.
She said: "Make the attempt; you will be aided."
"No, madame," I replied; "when I think that you, who have a
hundred-fold more cleverness than I, have not been able to maintain
yourself at Court as you wished, what would happen to me, a poor
foreigner, who knows nothing of intrigues and does not like them?"
She was angry and said: "Fie! you are good for nothing."
She never could forgive the king for not having declared her queen.
She gave herself out to the King of England as so pious and humble
that the queen took her for a saint. The old _guenipe_ knew very well
that I was a German who could never in my life endure a misalliance,
and she imagined that it was partly because of me that the king would
not acknowledge his marriage. The hatred she bore me came from that;
as long as the queen lived she did not hate me. After the death of
the king, and since we left Versailles, my son has not seen the old
woman. The mistresses of the late king did not tarnish his glory as
much as she did; she has drawn upon France the greatest misfortunes.
She occasioned the persecution of the Reformers; she caused the price
of wheat to rise, which brought a famine; she helped the ministers to
rob the king; she was guilty of the death of the king in consequence
of the worry she caused him about that Constitution [the bull
Unigenitus]; she made the marriage of my son, and tried to put the
bastards on the throne. In short, she threw all things into confusion
and ruined them. The ministers also served the king very ill. The
king never thought that his will would be sustained. He said to
several persons: "They made me write my will and other things; I did
it to get peace, but I know that all that will not stand hereafter."
PARIS, 1717.
I will tell you frankly why I will not interfere in anything. I am
old; I need to rest, and do not care to torment myself. I am not
willing to undertake anything that I cannot be sure of carrying
through to a good end; I have never learned to govern; politics I do
not understand, nor State affairs, and I am much too old now to learn
such difficult things. My son, thanks to God, has capacity enough to
guide things without me; besides, I should excite the jealousy of his
wife, and his eldest daughter, whom he loves better than he does me;
from this, perpetual quarrels would result, and that is something
that would in no wise suit me. I have been much urged and tormented
to use my influence, but I held firm. I said I wished to set a good
example to the wife and daughter of my son. This kingdom has, to its
sorrow, been too long governed by women, young and old. It is time to
let men take the helm. I have therefore adopted the course of meddling
in nothing. In England women can reign; but in France, in order to
have things go well, men must govern. What advantage should I gain
by tormenting myself night and day? I ask for only peace and rest.
All my own nearest ones are dead; for whom, therefore, should I give
myself cares? My life is nearly over; there remains to me only enough
to prepare for a tranquil death, and it is difficult in great public
matters to keep one's conscience peaceful.
I was born at Heidelberg, in September, 1652. When I can by my
influence help those poor people of the Palatinate in the councils
which decide their affairs, I employ it with all my heart. If it
succeeds I am very glad; if it fails I think it is the will of God,
and I am still content.
The king had a better opinion of my brain than it deserves. He wanted
with all his might to make me regent with my son. God be praised it
was not done. I should have gone crazy very quickly.
I have never had Trench manners and I never could assume them; I have
even made it a point of honour to be a German woman, and to preserve
German manners and ways, which are little to the taste of people here.
In the matter of soup, I never eat any but milk soup, or beer or wine
soup; I cannot endure broths; I am made ill at once if there is the
merest little broth in the dishes I eat; my body swells up, I have
colics, and I am forced to be bled; blood puddings[13] and ham settle
my stomach.
The king used to say of me: "Madame cannot endure misalliances; she is
always mocking at them." But all the great ladies who contract such
marriages are well rewarded; they are usually unhappy in wedlock and
ill-treated by their husbands. That is the case of the Princesse de
Deux-Ponts, who married her equerry. She finds herself very badly off,
but I do not pity her; she deserves it. I can't help laughing when
I think how I forewarned her of what would happen. She was with me
at the opera and wanted with all her might to have that equerry sit
behind us. I said, "For the love of God, Madame, let your Highness
keep quiet, and not worry yourself so about Gersdorf; you do not know
this country; when people show such anxiety about their servants it is
always supposed they are in love with them."
"Cannot persons feel an interest in their people?" she asked.
I said, "Yes; and they can take them to the opera, but there is no
need to have them close beside us." I did not know then that I had
guessed true.
PARIS, 1717.
For the last six months, in consequence of a terrible blow my son
received in the face when playing tennis, one of his eyes is all
inflamed and full of blood. He consulted an oculist who prescribed
good remedies and made him promise, above all, to restrain himself in
eating and drinking, etc.; but he cannot resolve to keep that promise
and he leads his usual life. The condition of the eye has therefore
grown much worse; my son has had recourse to all the remedies, but he
will not interrupt his pleasures, or his business, which gives him a
great deal of reading and writing to do. Yesterday, he let himself be
bled and purged; to-day he is trying a powder which a priest gave him,
having got it from Germany. This powder has begun by causing a great
inflammation; he will have to use it two or three times. I really fear
it will end in his losing his sight; and you cannot think into what
anxiety that idea throws me.
To answer the other points in your letter, I must tell you that it is
not allowable to take the communion in one's chamber, unless in case
of illness. I should like very much to hear sermons in Advent; but
after dinner it is impossible; for if I listen to preaching just after
eating it does not depend on me not to go to sleep.
The Princess of Wales is, thank God, safely delivered of a son. It
is quite common that pregnancies should be delayed, like hers, to
the tenth month. As for me, I have had three children, but without
anything extraordinary. I never had a miscarriage, and bore them all
to the end of the ninth month. I lost my first son; my doctor, old M.
Esprit, killed him as if he had shot him through the head; but all
that is ancient history. He was called the Duc de Valois; but as that
name is unlucky, Monsieur would not let my second son bear it; that is
why he received the name of Duc de Chartres, which he bore till the
death of his father; then he took the name of Duc d'Orléans, and his
son is now the Duc de Chartres.
PARIS, 1717.
The moment I get an instant of liberty I go to the chapel to pray
for my son, whose eye is rather better. He could not at one time
distinguish colours; but Cardinal de Polignac came to see him to-day
when I was with him, and my son could perfectly discern the cardinal's
red robe; which proves him really better. As long as he was taking
remedies he kept himself from excesses of eating and drinking and
ill-conduct of every kind, but I fear that as soon as he is cured he
will go back to his disorderly life. Those loose women will run after
him again and get him back to their little suppers, and then his eye
will inflame once more. After the visit to my son I sat down to table,
and after dinner I read four chapters of the Book of Job, four psalms,
and two chapters of Saint John. The two others I put off till this
morning.
It is quite true, as you say, that my son's mistresses if they really
loved him would think about his life and health; but I see, my dear
Louise, that you know nothing about Frenchwomen. Nothing leads them
except selfishness and a liking for debauchery; these mistresses think
of nothing but their pleasure and money; for the individual himself
they would not give a hair. That inspires me with utter disgust; and
if I were in my son's place I should find nothing seductive in such
connections. But he is so accustomed to them; it is all the same to
him what those women are, provided they amuse him. There is also
another thing I cannot comprehend. He is never jealous; he will let
his own servants have relations with his mistresses. That seems to me
dreadful, and proves that he has no love for them. He is so accustomed
to eat and drink and lead that debauched life that he cannot tear
himself from it. It often afflicts me to the bottom of my heart; but
I hope that God will in the end draw him through this labyrinth and
wrench him from the hands of these wicked people, who are only wanting
to get money from him. But that is saying enough about vexations.
The little king makes me two visits a year much against his will; he
cannot endure me. I think that is because I told him once it did not
become a great king to be so refractory and obstinate as he is. He
was in despair one day because Mme. de Ventadour left him. She said:
"Sire, I shall return this evening; be very good during my absence."
"No, my dear mamma," he replied, "not if you leave me."
He is well made and has the straightest figure that was ever seen
and beautiful brown hair in abundance. His face is pretty, but he
only speaks to those persons who habitually surround him. He has
intelligence, that is very certain, but he ought to talk more. He has
invented an Order which he gives to the boys who play with him; it is
a blue and white ribbon, from which hangs an oval piece of enamelled
metal, on which is a star and the outline of a little tent which
stands on the terrace where he plays. He has eyes as black as jet,
and what may be called a noble look; the eyes are much softer than he
really is, for he has a violent little temper. His vanity is already
dreadful, and he knows very well what reverence is.
PARIS, 1717.
The late king told me a story about the Queen of Sweden, Christina.
She never wore night-caps, but she twisted a towel round her head.
Once, not being able to sleep, she had music played beside her bed.
As the concert pleased her she suddenly protruded her head beyond
the curtains and called out, "Devil's death! how well they play!"
The eunuchs and Italians, who are not the bravest of the brave, were
so terrified at the aspect of that singular figure that they were
struck speechless, and the music had to stop. We can still see at
Fontainebleau in the great salon the blood of the man she caused to
be murdered there. She did not wish that all that he knew about her
should come to be known, and she thought certain things would surely
be divulged unless she put an end to his life. He had already begun
to tattle, out of jealousy for another man who had supplanted him
in her good graces. She was very vindictive and given to all sorts
of debauchery. If she had not had so much intellect no one could
have endured her. She owed her vices to Frenchmen, especially to old
Bourdelot, who was the doctor of the great Condé; he encouraged her in
her license. She talked of things that the worst men only could have
imagined. She was considered to be an hermaphrodite. The Frenchmen who
were with her in Stockholm were very depraved men, and it was they who
led her into such licentiousness. Duke Frederick Augustus of Brunswick
was charmed with Christina; he said that in all his life he had never
met with any woman who had so much intellect and was so agreeable
and diverting; he never found the time long when he was with her. I
told him I heard that her talk was most licentious; he said that was
true, but that she knew so well how to present things that they did
not inspire disgust. This qu
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