The Sun King

by Nancy Mitford

  Grand Dieu sauvez le roi

  Vive le roi

  Qu’ à jamais glorieux

  Louis victorieux

  Voie ses ennemis toujours soumis

  Vive le roi

  For Mme de Brinon was the author of ‘God Save the King’. Lully’s tune has been lost.

  The King inspected everything. He talked to the girls, made a speech to the Dames, attended Mass and ended by thanking Mme de Maintenon for the pleasure it had all given him. From now on Saint-Cyr was to be a life within a life for him as well as for her. The troubles he had brought on himself by the revocation of the Edict of Nantes were beginning to harass him and he liked to forget them for an hour or two among his wife’s pretty little pupils. He was at his very best there; he shed his terrifying majesty and turned into a kind old uncle, taking little girls on his knee, chatting with them and hearing them recite their lessons. Never had he been so natural with his own family. His eagle eye saw everything, as it always did; he summed up the children’s characters, knew who was happy, who had been crying, who was mutinous. As for Mme de Maintenon, she was there, in the beginning, two days out of every three, often arriving at 6 a.m. and only leaving ten or twelve hours later. She attended to every material detail, from brushing the hair of the very little ones to the composition of the meals. On summer evenings the King would join her there, go to Compline in the chapel and walk home with her. It could not have been foreseen, at this stage, what a source of worry Saint-Cyr was to become.

  Since part of the curriculum consisted in learning and reciting poetry, Mme de Brinon, with the approval of Mme de Maintenon, thought it would be a good idea to let the girls act little plays. She wrote them herself and they were on the silly side; Mme de Maintenon, who was obliged to sit through the performances, found them insupportable. She said the children really must be given something better, so they were then put on to Andromaque. The love and loathing of which this play are compounded were so well interpreted that Mme de Maintenon took fright. She wrote to Racine and said she could never allow the girls to act in one of his plays again unless he wrote one with a religious subject specially for them. Would he not do this?

  Racine was in high favour at the Court. He was Gentleman-in-Ordinary to the King who said that his handsome, rubicund, jolly face was one of those liked best. When the King suffered from insomnia, Racine would read aloud to him, which he did incomparably; he could read from a Latin text putting it into exquisite French as he went along. He and his inseparable friend, Boileau, were appointed to be the King’s historiographers, in which capacity they used to go to the front. Like journalists in modern wars, they were regarded as a perfect nuisance by the soldiers; unlike the modern journalists, however, they were very much against risking their skins. Racine told the King it was not surprising the soldiers were brave — their lives were so ghastly they must long for them to end; he had something to live for and had no wish to be carried off by a cannon ball. Indeed he loved the life at Versailles, he idolized the King and was under the glamour of high society. He said the secret of getting on with society people is never to speak of one’s own work — let them think it is they who are brilliant. The King, seeing Racine out for a walk with the fascinating Marquis de Cavoye, said ‘I often see those two together and I’m sure I know why. Cavoye likes to think he is an intellectual and Racine fancies himself as a courtier’.

  Racine was a Jansenist at heart; he had been partly brought up at Port-Royal where his aunt was one of the nuns. After the shock of nearly being involved in the Affair of the Poisons, he turned to religion. He married a holy person and four out of their five daughters became nuns. Mme Racine knew nothing about poetry and had never read, let alone seen, one of her husband’s plays; to her as to all simple folk of the day, there was something damnable about the theatre and everything to do with it. Racine grew more and more obsessed with Jansenism; he gave up writing plays altogether and composed little things for Louis XIV, inscriptions for medals, the captions underneath tapestries and so on. He divided his time between Versailles, Port-Royal and his happy family life in the street which is now called rue Visconti, in Paris.

  When Mme de Maintenon asked Racine to write a religious play for her girls to act, he went off to consult Boileau who said the whole idea was ridiculous. Racine agreed with him. But then, as so often happens with writers, the proposition turned in his head until finally he conceived Esther, a play about the existing situation and characters at Versailles, dressed up in biblical garb. Mme de Maintenon, who was portrayed most flatteringly as holy Esther, triumphing over Mme de Montespan (l’altière Vasthi dont j’occupe la place) was delighted with the play; and the young actresses, choir and so on were put to work. She said it was good for them to have something on hand which kept them busy, filled their heads with beautiful words and stopped them gossiping.

  They had good reason to gossip, for a crisis had arisen in the school. The girls, the Dames and Mme de Brinon herself would hardly have been human if all the fuss that was made of them had not turned their heads. They began to assume an intolerably self-important air. The girls, most of whom came from dull little country homes, soon had visions of some Prince Charming who would carry them off to a glittering existence at the Court. In vain did Mme de Maintenon hold forth on the boredom of Versailles; they could hardly be expected to believe her. In the end, their hopes of marriage were seldom fulfilled; Mme de Maintenon was always to complain that there were not enough of what she called sons-in-law. ‘Alas, my children, few men prefer your virtues to other people’s dowries.’ She consoled them by saying that marriage makes three-quarters of the human race miserable (it was one of her favourite observations); the woman has to submit to such dreadful things. ‘When the young ladies find themselves faced with the ordeal of marriage they will see that it is no laughing matter.’ However, at the beginning, when Saint-Cyr was so much in the news, a few excellent matches were made, notably that of the future Lady Bolingbroke who married an ancient, rich M. de Villette.

  Mme de Brinon, thoroughly spoilt by Mme de Maintenon, began to see herself as a key personage of the realm, confidante of the King himself, a sort of female minister. She let it be understood that she could help people to obtain benefits at Versailles. She surrounded herself with favourites in the school, holding a little court of her own; her room there was absurdly luxurious and over-decorated. She went to take the cure at Bourbon and behaved in a mad way, like a reigning mistress, receiving delegations from local big-wigs; when she got back to Saint-Cyr she was bold enough to criticize and even to undo some changes made by Mme de Maintenon in her absence. Mme de Maintenon watched all this with growing disgust. Suddenly she took a high hand with Mme de Brinon and told her that everybody at Saint-Cyr, the Dames, the girls and not least the Superior, had become impossible. She proposed to take away some of her friend’s prerogatives, to punish her. Mme de Brinon hit back, pointing out that under the constitution of Saint-Cyr she was there for life. The girls and the Dames were on her side and let this be felt; there were mutinous faces everywhere.

  Mme de Maintenon sat alone in her room, pondering the next move. It was nothing less than a lettre de cachet, signed by the King, digging out Mme de Brinon and ordering her to go at once to a convent. She left early in the morning, without saying goodbye to anybody, by the garden gate, where a hackney carriage awaited her. The Dames and the girls were thunderstruck and inconsolable when this departure became known. Mme de Maintenon assembled them and said that in spite of all she owed to Mme de Brinon, they differed too much on matters of policy; therefore it was best that they should part. In fact the two women remained on friendly terms and corresponded for years. Mme de Brinon also had the satisfaction of acting as go-between for Bossuet and Leibniz, who wrote to each other, through her, about possibly unifying the Catholic and Lutheran Churches. She was a clever person, but too masterful to be able to work with Mme de Maintenon for long.

  The Saint-Cyr production of Esther in 1689 was a smashin
g success. Mme de Maintenon had always intended that it should be played to a small, intimate audience but the King, who went to the dress rehearsal with the Dauphin, thought the play so good that he wanted all the world to see it. He drew up a list of those to be invited; and came back early from hunting for the first night, which he attended with courtiers, ministers and members of the Paris Parlement. He stood with his stick across the door of the room which had been transformed into a theatre, only lowering it for those who had really been asked. After that, everybody who was anybody had to see Esther. On the second night the Dauphin went with various members of the royal family and his own friends; the third was for Père de La Chaise and the clergy; but the last night was the most brilliant when the King came again with his cousins, the exiled King James of England and Queen Mary, who had just arrived in France. Three crowned heads! Mme de Sévigné went down from Paris with other friends of Mme de Maintenon’s. Places had been kept for them just behind the duchesses. Mme de Sévigné thought the play sublime and touching. The King, who had an air of being the host which gave him an amiable sweetness, actually spoke to her:

  ‘Madame, it seems you are satisfied.’

  ‘Sire, I am charmed.’

  ‘Racine is a man of parts.’

  ‘Sire, indeed he is, but in truth the young ladies must take some credit.’

  ‘Ah! That is a fact!’

  Then he went off, having made her an object of envy. After that she talked for a second with Mme de Maintenon, off like lightning after the King, and had a word with Bossuet. At a supper party in Paris later that evening she recounted her ‘little prosperities’ to her friends.

  Racine was covered with glory, and had to go and pray in the chapel that God would take away his pride. But of course, the French being what they are there was a good deal of irreverent joking about Esther. M. de Breteuil, the father of Voltaire’s Mme du Châtelet, wrote satirical verses pointing out, what everybody had noticed, the identities of ‘Assuerus’ and the others. Mme de Lafayette thought the play lamentable, only written to flatter Mme de Maintenon and crush Athénaïs. Furthermore she thought it was folly to keep all these pretty girls within a stone’s throw of the Versailles gallants. Public opinion, on the whole, was shocked by the idea of innocent and well-born young women on the stage. Hérbert, the curé of Versailles, refused to attend the play, but Bossuet, Fénelon and the Jesuits were in favour of it. The Dutch gossip writers said that old Esther was establishing a seraglio at Saint-Cyr for Ahasuerus.

  When the King got back to Versailles a particularly poignant piece of bad news awaited him. The Queen of Spain, charming, pretty daughter of Monsieur and the first Madame, had died after vomiting incessantly for two days. She was almost certainly poisoned, probably by the Comtesse de Soissons, in the interest of the Austrians, who wanted to remove a French influence at Madrid. The little Queen had longed very much to marry the Dauphin. When the King told her she was to be Queen of Spain he had added ‘I couldn’t do more for my own daughter’. ‘But you could have done more for your niece’, she remarked sadly. In 1679 she had left France in floods of tears and had thereafter never known a happy moment. Her letters worried everybody, but there was nothing to be done. She was trapped in the ghastly etiquette of the Spanish court, not even allowed to speak to her old French groom, lonely and always frightened. She had duly informed the King of the one state secret entrusted to her, namely that King Charles II of Spain was impotent. All the same she had brought a ray of happiness into the life of that pathetic man. The Court went into deep mourning and there were no more performances of Esther.

  14. SAINT-CYR, THE CONVENT

  The woman is so hard upon the woman.

  LORD TENNYSON

  The success of Esther had finished turning the heads of Mme de Maintenon’s charges at Saint-Cyr. At the very first contact with the great world they had ceased to be simple little girls, and had become affected, ambitious women, all too reminiscent of everything she hated at Versailles. She blamed herself for her original conception of the place and decided she must begin again from the beginning, on an entirely new basis. Having envisaged Saint-Cyr as a sort of finishing school, where she would equip ardent young creatures to carry French civilization to the four corners of the provinces, the moment she came up against difficulties which were largely of her own making, she went into reverse. She began by forbidding literature lessons; there were to be no more poetry readings, dangerous for young women, and above all no more interesting conversation or the girls would be bored to death when they got back to their dull homes. Rather, let them love silence, suitable to the sex. Then she decided that it would be better not to educate them at all; women are too superficial; they never learn anything properly, and a little useless knowledge is apt to make them neglect their duties. So their books were taken away and intellectual studies replaced by household work. She told them that they had become absurdly coquettish and clean; a little dirt never did any harm. Of course they were all furious and miserable at this new state of affairs, so much so that two of the girls tried to poison a Dame who had thrown away make-up which she found on their dressing-table. They were caught, given a punishment which made the others tremble (we don’t know what it was) and expelled.

  The King took the girls’ side as much as he could. He was so sorry for them that he sent his band to play in their courtyard, hoping to cheer them up. When the curriculum was changed he insisted that they should go on with their music; and he literally forced Mme de Maintenon, against her will, to allow them to give a performance of Athalie, with which Racine had followed up the success of his Esther. They did so, but it was not very amusing for them (if such a word could be used in the same breath as the horrifying Athalie) since they were allowed no costumes, no scenery and no audience, except the two old Kings, Louis and James.

  All this was only the beginning — much worse things were in store. Mme de Maintenon talked a great deal to Fénelon about her problems, and he now set down some reflections for the young ladies. No other joys than our hopes of Eternal Bliss; no assemblies except to hear words of the Faith; no feast but that of the Lamb; no pleasure except the singing of psalms. Fénelon had taken Mme de Brinon’s place as Mme de Maintenon’s bosom friend, perfection in her eyes. It was a bad choice; Fénelon was not the man for her. In spite of a worldly appearance (his great charm, good looks and gentle manners making him seem almost like an Abbé de Cour) he never deviated from the teaching of Christ, so of course he was soon at odds with the temporal power, in other words the King, and finally, up to a point, with the Pope himself. But before the King grasped the intransigence of his nature, he had allowed himself to be persuaded by Mme de Maintenon to appoint the Abbé tutor of the precious grandsons, the Duc de Bourgogne and his brothers.

  Mme de Maintenon was looking for a spiritual director. Fénelon would have liked the post; and she longed to have him but gave striking proof of how little she understood human beings (and nobody has ever understood them less than she) by deciding that he would line the path to heaven with too many flowers. She made overtures to Bourdaloue, but he was beginning to practise what he preached and to devote himself to poor people and those in prison. He had no time for Mme de Maintenon. Meanwhile Fénelon wrote her a letter, summing up her character. He said she was dry, cold and often tactless; she liked people too much at first, and when they turned out to be less than perfect she was cruel to them. Greater submission to God was needed, to make her more understanding of others. She was too proud and egotistic, though naturally good and confiding. As for the King, she must touch, instruct and open his heart but it was useless to tire him by returning to the charge and always bringing up the big guns. She should make him long for peace and to relieve his people, and also give him a horror of despotic actions, but above all she must choose the best moment to implant these truths.

  Then Fénelon wrote a similar letter to the King, full of disagreeable observations — we are told every day that you are the delight of your peo
ple but an unjust war ruins the nation; you reward those who deserve to be punished; glory, which hardens your heart, is dearer to you than justice; you neither know nor love God — whereupon Mme de Maintenon, in her turn, accused him of tactlessness and not choosing the best moment to implant home truths, which only irritated and discouraged the King. These two letters were the beginning of the end of Fénelon’s career as a courtier.

  Mme de Maintenon finally chose Godet des Marais, Bishop of Chartres, to be her confessor. He was a strait-laced man, more like a monk than a Prince of the Church. He took over the lady and her school which, in double quick time, he turned into a convent. Six priests of the order of St Vincent de Paul, noted for their humility and obscurity, were installed at Saint-Cyr as regular confessors. Then the Bishop of Chartres sent for the Dames whom he interviewed in private, one by one. He told them they were at liberty to leave Saint-Cyr, either to go back to the world or to join other convents, but if they stayed there they must become nuns. There is a French proverb: ‘Where the goat is tied up, there she must browse’; this was their situation. Most of them had been at the school, either at Rueil or at Saint-Cyr for years. Their homes were like a faraway dream and in many cases held no place for them any more. It would be pointless to go to an unknown convent. Only one of them left, to be married; the others, with great repugnance, decided to obey the Bishop. He made them sign a document accepting his direction and, begging them to tranquillize their souls, he took his leave.

  The new nuns of the Community of St Augustine could hardly grasp the full horror of what had befallen them. They found themselves belonging to a particularly severe order; they were never again to leave Saint-Cyr, even in mortal illness (a little hut was built in the garden for smallpox patients, where twelve girls and Dames once died in a single week); they must never receive letters or visits, except from members of the royal family. Having taken the vow of poverty, they must live in miserable discomfort, with no warmth in winter, nightly vigils and not one moment, ever, to themselves. When food ran short, the children must have what there was; it did nobody any harm to fast, they were told, and they could live on vegetables, of which a delicious list was appended to the rules. The King greatly regretted this new state of affairs but was talked into accepting it by Mme de Maintenon and Bossuet. The Pope now, in 1692, gave Mme de Maintenon a signal honour, the right of visitation in all French convents.