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

by Veronica Buckley

  Whatever Constant’s plans at this point for Marie-Galante, his family, had they known of them, would not have been enthusiastic. Jeanne and the children were no longer even on the island, having fled in the previous October, chased out by the increasingly hostile Irish. The family’s “protector,” Merry Rolle, had been the first to give up and go, swiftly followed by his noble friends. The engagés and slaves had seized their chance to escape, leaving Jeanne no choice but to leave, too, although, revealing the origin of her daughter’s own stubbornness, she had stuck it out to the end, and was the very last of the French to leave. They took ship for Martinique, and docked at Fort Royal, scene of their first arrival in the islands a year or so before.

  Here Jeanne found a letter waiting for her, written in the late summer of 1645, when Constant was still in France. It was a buoyant missive, as always, and full of news: Jeanne was to settle in, presumably on Marie-Galante, in high style. All would now be well; their worries were at an end; from now on there was going to be money and to spare. Surprisingly, she took this on trust; perhaps, like the company commissioners, she felt she had nothing to lose. Though Marie-Galante was now out of the question, a good colonial life might be lived just as easily on Martinique. So Jeanne did as her husband had instructed, borrowing heavily against his expectations. She found a fine, large house in the northern settlement of Le Prêcheur, away from the rough garrison town of Fort Royal, and staffed it handsomely, adding to her two servants at least twelve, and perhaps as many as twenty, new-bought slaves.

  Le Prêcheur was a lovely site, luxuriant with tropical vegetation, its close heat moderated by the trade winds, and ringed by nine little coves of black sand, the ancient gift of Mount Pelée, the island’s dormant volcano. In her beautiful house, supported by her husband’s promise of continuing money, Jeanne found some quietude at last, and her daughter reaped the benefit of it. For the first time, Françoise was permitted a measure of freedom, and she took advantage of it by wandering outside, listening to the birds, even joining with her mother’s slaves in the chants and rhythms of their traditional songs and dances.

  She and Charles did have some lessons to do, set for them by their mother. Jeanne cannot have had many books to hand, but she did have one that was read and enjoyed by all literate people at the time: a popularized version of Plutarch’s Parallel Lives of the great Greeks and Romans. It is not surprising that Jeanne should have taken care to carry a copy with her on her long journey; Plutarch’s practical wisdom, in its way, was not so far from that of her much admired François de Sales. Both accorded well with her own untheatrical morality: “Never do anything you’d be ashamed to do in front of the people you respect.” “If you want to be happy, consider those less fortunate than yourself.” So she urged her young ones, guided by the ancient moralist as by the modern. Jeanne seems to have begun by reading the Plutarch stories to the children herself, and thereafter it became more or less their only reading. They do not seem to have minded. Even Charles was happy to sit still for an hour or two every day, drinking in the old heroic tales; he and his sister learned passages by heart together outside in the garden, with the sun slanting through the palm tree fronds. Given the many “good works” of her later life, Françoise might have been expected to respond more to the down-to-earth lessons in living woven through the Lives, but during her childhood it was their heroic aspect that appealed to her above all. “My brother insisted that his heroes were more extraordinary than any heroine. But I said that a woman like that has done more to make herself heroic than a man. We argued it out between us.” So she was to say long afterwards, revealing that even as a ten-year-old, and despite her mother’s uneven love, she had possessed a keen sense of her own intrinsic value.

  She revealed a keen aesthetic sense, too. “There is an extreme pleasure to be had in gazing at the celestial constellations in the beauty and serenity of a tropical night,” wrote Père Maurile. Françoise loved to look out through the sultry darkness at the black sea, with the stars brilliantly reflected in it. “I imagined,” she said, “that these reflections must be diamonds, since I’d heard people say you could sometimes find diamonds in the sea.”

  In March or April 1646, an intrepid young Frenchman visited the family at their lovely abode in Le Prêcheur: he was Esprit Cabart, chevalier seigneur de Villermont, just eighteen or nineteen years of age, the son of a parlementary lawyer in Paris, traveller, entrepreneur, man of letters, art collector, gourmet, colonial governor, and possible spy—most of this as yet in embryo, but already a stark and unflattering contrast to the listless Constant, unable to move beyond the four walls of his own house, and only one year younger. Cabart de Villermont was a sociable young man, but discreet and reliable, too; officially in the Caribbean to seek out interesting plants for the royal gardens, he was in fact looking into the slave trade, currently dominated by the Dutch and the English, with a view to a French involvement in this profitable traffic. His visit to the d’Aubignés was not simply a matter of chance, the usual banding together of gently bred compatriots in faraway places; rather, he appears to have known the family already, perhaps through his acquaintance with a relative of theirs in Paris, the baron de Saint-Hermant, a cousin or perhaps brother of Jeanne’s friend Madame de Neuillant. While his ship was being refitted in Fort Royal, he stayed with the family in Le Prêcheur, a most welcome guest to them all, Constant perhaps excepted. For the children, he had adventurous tales to tell, and was young enough to tell them thrillingly; for Jeanne, being mature beyond his years, he provided a sympathetic ear, sensible conversation, and above all a link to home; in the future, he would be of good practical service to her.

  Cabart de Villermont left Le Prêcheur probably sometime in April 1646, unwittingly signalling the end of the d’Aubignés’ good days on Martinique. One evening—“I had just put my doll to bed, and drawn my veil over her for a mosquito net”—fire broke out in the grand house. Jeanne rushed to save her books, a revealing priority, and afterwards chided her tearful daughter: “What, girl! Weeping for a house!” she exclaimed. Françoise does not seem to have replied, “but I was crying for my doll,” she later admitted. “The fire was gaining the place where I’d left her.”

  The books were saved, but the doll was lost, and with her went the house, presumably most of the family’s possessions, and all their borrowed money other than that made flesh in their living slaves. They seem to have moved at this point into the house of a Monsieur Delarue, a native of Niort like themselves, who took them in out of kindness, or perhaps for some small rent, and there they waited, and waited, for Constant.

  Where he was now, they had no idea. They had had no news of him since the letter written from France in the previous summer, urging Jeanne to borrow freely to set up house on Marie-Galante. But between then and now they had fled Marie-Galante, borrowed a fortune, and lost everything in the fire. At the beginning of June 1646 Jeanne penned a bitter letter to Louise at Mursay, making reference to the unrelenting family of Caumont d’Adde, still pursuing their now useless lawsuits against her. Jeanne no longer cared. “Let him eat up the property of widows and orphans as he likes,” she wrote. “I don’t want to talk about him any more.” As for Constant: “I shall say nothing to you of him or his behaviour, since I don’t want to lessen your goodwill towards him. Let me simply say that I intend to send your elder nephew back to start out in the army somewhere. He’s just wasting away here, wasting his time, and his health; the air is bad and the food is bad, too. As for the younger one, I’d like him to get a place as a page; he’s a really lovely boy, even if I do say it myself, and since their father doesn’t deign to think of them, I’ll have to be mother and father both. If you hear of anything suitable for them, please be so kind as to let me know…I can see I’ll be here for some years yet…Bignette will be writing to you. She forgets everything—it’s so hot here, and the food is so bad…She has no pleasure, poor child, except to hear news of you…”

  Reading this letter, secure in her châ
teau at Mursay, Louise cannot but have felt the gradual wearing down of her sister-in-law’s once determined spirit. Cabart de Villermont’s visit had evidently prompted Jeanne to do something about her sons’ professional lives, but her listless phrases—“If you hear of anything suitable for them, please be so kind…”—do not suggest any very active pursuit of a position for either of them. There was no news, no money, and quite suddenly, it seemed, no hope. After months of incautious optimism, she gave in at last to despondency.

  It was to be sixty years before Françoise felt able to tell the story, to other little girls of the age that she had then been, of the wretched time the family spent in their last weeks on the island of Martinique. If Constant was oblivious, and Charles managed to escape to the bush or the beach, it was Françoise who bore the brunt of her mother’s grimly altered state of mind. Occasional empathy with the “poor child” notwithstanding, Jeanne, strained and isolated, vented her daily frustrations on the daughter she could not love. Françoise records her mother on one occasion cruelly brushing her hair until she drew blood from her scalp, then forcing her to stand outside to battle the tropical insects which settled on her bleeding head. It was the act of a woman overwhelmed by anxiety, lashing out at the nearest thing; but all the same, as Françoise’s secretary would one day comment, it was “a very hard thing to do to her daughter.”

  The girl had already given signs of an exceptional resilience, to which Jeanne’s own strong will had no doubt contributed. There was a natural toughness in her, as natural as her warm heart and her quick mind. But cruelty, and from a mother’s hands, is a powerful catalyst in the forming of a character, and it was probably during these last days on Martinique that the first glint of iron entered Françoise’s soul.

  Rescue came for them all in the form of a letter from Constant, written at the governor’s residence in Basseterre on the island of Saint-Christophe. The letter seems to have reached them in Le Prêcheur later in this June of 1646. Why Constant had taken so long to seek them out can only be guessed at. He had left La Rochelle in December 1645, presumably arriving in the islands towards the end of February; in the four intervening months he would have had time enough to sail to France and back again—perhaps he did. It is possible that he had been on Saint-Christophe all the time, making secret arrangements for the takeover of the English-held centre of the island. But even unreliable Constant would not have been very likely to leave his family unprovided for and unenquired after on an island only 150 miles away. If he had, it was probably Cabart de Villermont who had recalled him to his responsibilities, informing him, if he did not know already, that they were at Le Prêcheur on Martinique and waiting for news of him. Cabart de Villermont had encountered him in May or June in Basseterre, where Constant had established himself as a high-ranking guest of Governor de Poincy.

  At Le Prêcheur, belongings were packed, money was scraped together, and passage booked on some ship or boat to Saint-Christophe. They arrived sometime in July, it seems, and took up abode, all four of them, and probably their servants, too, at the governor’s spacious residence.

  For Jeanne, the sense of relief was tremendous. First, Constant was found; he was well, he had prospects, or at least appeared to have. They were at last living comfortably—indeed, more than comfortably, in a beautiful mansion with servants everywhere, with good furniture and good food on the table every day, and money to pay every bill. An elegant form of charity it may have been, but for now this was not Jeanne’s concern. The d’Aubignés were welcome here; Constant and the governor got on very well; his plans were interesting and, for a time at least, seemed feasible; and—most importantly in the governor’s eyes—he carried the imprimatur of the all-powerful Compagnie.

  And Basseterre was delightful, a fine little town of modern streets and squares, and a busy port with every modern convenience. The d’Aubignés excepted, everyone had money to spend, the fruit of thriving tobacco plantations across the island. The governor was Robert de Longvilliers de Poincy, the second in what was to be a centuries-long family line of important officials in the Caribbean. He was a young man, and he enjoyed living in high colonial style. Every visitor of any vague distinction became his guest; every evening saw a sumptuous repast served in his beautiful dining-room, and no one was happier that this should be the case than the ingratiating Constant and his rejuvenated wife. Even Cabart de Villermont spent two months with them, gracing the governor’s liberal table and adding a touch of delight, no doubt, to Jeanne’s primary feeling of deliverance.

  And she was transformed: still only thirty-five and now charming and beautiful once again, she was the star of every candlelit dinner and every sunny breakfast. No complaints about “bad food” issued from her pen now; the governor’s table was a byword for extravagance, and the local fare was more than equal to his demanding standards. There was poultry: familiar chicken, plus pigeon and dove and “two or three types of parrot, very good for eating,” as well as “an infinity of other birds, not at all like ours.” There was meat: agoutis, “a kind of rabbit,” or perhaps acouli, “a kind of cat, but very good to eat,” tenderized in papaya juice or spiced with sauces made of pimento or the clovelike touri. There were freshwater and salt fish of all kinds, as well as crab, turtle, shark, and sea cow, “though the natives can’t bear to eat this since it’s much too fatty, but foreigners will” (it was a standard treatment for venereal disease). The local manioc plant provided both bread and wine. Vegetables included sweet pumpkin and, previously unknown to the European d’Aubignés, potatoes, both white and red, boiled or roasted. For dessert, there were cashew nuts—“We made a really delicious wine from these, very good for stomach-ache”—and an endless supply of citrus and other local fruits: guava, papaya, banana—“We made wine from this; it tastes just like cider”—and pineapple—“We made a very good wine from this, too.” And for those with an especially sweet tooth, there was the ubiquitous sugarcane—“We ate lots of this; it fattened us up and kept us regular.”

  For six months the d’Aubignés lived in comfort at Basseterre, en famille and without worry for the first time in years, indeed for the first time ever. But it was for the last time, too. At the end of the year, Constant sailed again for France, leaving his family in the care of Governor de Poincy, who by now had, frankly, had enough. Why Constant had gone, no one was certain. When he would return was less certain still. The governor’s polished manners grew markedly less suave as the months wore on, as the rainy season came, as no word arrived from Constant, and as the first anniversary rolled around of this hopeless gentry beggar family sponging off him in his own proud house.

  Jeanne was no fool, and the children, too, were old enough now to feel their own humiliation. If the boys did not care, Françoise did. She was a perceptive eleven-year-old, and every turning downwards in the governor’s tone stabbed as a little pin into her sensitive skin. How Jeanne gathered the money together is uncertain—there was a young lady by the name of Rossignol who may have helped—but in July 1647, after more than three years in the Caribbean, they all set sail home for France, a two-month voyage once again, this time tossed by storms and, much worse, overcast by a sense of desperation. “When the sea waves rise,” wrote Père Maurile, “beating furiously against the hull of the ship, reducing all on board to a fearful silence, in this we see the power and the anger of God…”

  It is romantic, at least in retrospect, whether or not it seemed so to Jeanne and her family, that on the high seas on their voyage back to France, they were almost captured by pirates. It was an all-too-common danger in an age of disputed territories and overstretched navies, with every cargo worth a fortune and every loyalty up for sale. The very island they had come from had boasted a retired buccaneer as its first colonial governor; his retirement had merely opened the field for another half-dozen to take his place. Facing them now, Jeanne showed a glint of the old mettle: she dressed Françoise and Charles in their best clothes, the more nobly to confront whatever should befall them, a
nd about her daughter’s waist she wrapped a wooden rosary, an amulet against the fate worse than death that was certain to befall her if she should survive the anticipated journey to some unknown land in the East. But after her miserable Caribbean years, the prospect of life as a white slave seemed not so bad to eleven-year-old Françoise; eyes fixed on the pirate ship, she whispered to her brother, “At least if we’re captured, we’ll never have to see maman again.”

  They were not captured, but remained with maman, and early in the autumn of 1647, on a fine day, perhaps, or perhaps with a chill already in the air, they docked at La Rochelle.

  Three

  Terra Infirma

  “You’re a fine fellow not to have written to me for two months. Have you forgotten who I am, and the place I hold within the family?” A letter from a lady to a gentleman, written, not without irony, at this time, but it is not a letter from Jeanne to Constant. It is a letter from the marquise de Sévigné, aged a lovely twenty-two, to her cousin, the comte de Bussy-Rabutin, teasing him for his unaccustomed neglect of her. It had been many more than two months since Jeanne had heard from Constant, and Madame de Sévigné, writing from the comfort of her country château, would have been grieved to see that other neglected lady disembarking from the ship at the port of La Rochelle in the autumn of 1647, worn and weathered, laden with the remnants of a life of half-gentility, shepherding her three sunburnt children in winter clothes now much too small for them. The youngest child, nearing twelve years of age, was a pretty brunette, with huge black eyes looking out from a brown face. Three or four years later, when it was pale once again, the marquise would come to know this pretty face well.