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

by Veronica Buckley

  La Rochelle was a fine city of white stone, wealthy with shipping and trading. A Protestant safe town, it had once been self-governing, almost Hanseatic in spirit, but its proud independence and much of its prosperity had come to an end in 1628, after the prolonged siege by royalist troops which Cardinal Richelieu had led in person and which the English Duke of “Boucquinquant” had so dismally failed to raise. Four-fifths of the people of La Rochelle had perished in the siege; those who survived had found their religious freedoms intact, but their civil and political rights, as Protestants, thenceforth greatly restricted.

  Since those days of religious warfare, during which Constant had proved so accommodating to both sides, La Rochelle had recovered much of its population and all of its vitality, and money was again passing easily through the hands of the town’s busy residents. If the d’Aubignés had made no fortune in the islands, others were certainly doing so. The quays were laden with sacks of tobacco and indigo, and successful traders, waving and yelling instructions, pushed past Jeanne and her little crew now towards their goods and their profits.

  The family’s immediate need was for somewhere to sleep. Like all port cities, La Rochelle was full of cheap lodgings, and Jeanne quickly found one: a single attic room for the four of them to share. It was a very far cry from their twenty-odd slaves in Martinique and the governor’s residence on Saint-Christophe, but it was shelter, and it would serve—it would have to serve—until Jeanne should get word to Constant and he should come for them.

  Constant, however, was never to come for them, for he was dead, and he had lain four weeks already mouldering in his grave. And as in life, so in death: no one was quite sure where he was. He had died in the Rhône province of Orange, said one report; at Constantinople, said another: there he had been planning to be circumcised and convert to Islam, for reasons now lost, and perhaps best left in obscurity.

  The last word heard from him had been entirely typical: a letter asking for money—not for his family, however, who went unmentioned, but for himself, “some little allowance, paid once a year…I’m going as far away as possible from everyone who knows me…I’ll send you the address…I’ll be going by the name of Charles des Landes.” This letter, to his half-brother Nathan in Geneva, had been written from Lyon in June of 1647, and from Lyon he had made his way to Orange, or rather back to Orange, where he had lived for a few months longer in the house of the widow Deslongea, a name suspiciously similar to the alias which he himself had been on the point of adopting. It seems that he was intending to settle, with or without the widow, in Provence or the prosperous Languedoc, but on the last day of August, in the widow’s house, he had died.

  It was not until two and a half years later that Jeanne would receive confirmation of her husband’s death from the “Pastors and Elders of the Reformed Church of the town of Orange,” and it was the pastors and elders who had buried him, too, “according to the rites of the Reformed Religion, which he had practised in private and in public in our congregation during the whole time of his sojourn in this town, which however was only about four months.” Constant had evidently made an umpteenth tactical abjuration in order to remain in Orange, which, though only fifteen miles from Avignon and perched alongside the Rhône river, was not at this time part of France. It was a tiny, independent principality, an ancient fief of the Holy Roman Empire, ruled by the Dutch prince, William II—crucially, for Constant at least, a Protestant.

  Constant’s choice of this little bastion of reformed religion is significant, for it lends credence to the assertion of his brother-in-law Benjamin that, since his return from the Caribbean early in 1647, he had been travelling back and forth to England, changing religion on each voyage, as he had done before first setting off for the islands in 1644. One especially well-informed contemporary, the memoirist Gédéon Tallemant des Réaux, recorded in his journal on October 1, 1647, at about the time of the family’s arrival back in La Rochelle: “I knew for a reasonable certainty that d’Aubigné…went over to the English in the islands and not long ago he was sent to England by their commander in those distant countries.” Even Cabart de Villermont, Jeanne’s adventurous young friend, noted that Constant “went to England on an English ship. He changed religion and they went in pursuit of him; then he came to Paris and changed religion and there was another pursuit.” Precisely when these events had occurred, Cabart de Villermont did not record, but the “pursuits” are interesting: it seems more than likely that Constant’s repeated bargaining of French against English interests had finally been discovered, or had finally become too dangerous, or too much of a nuisance, for him to be allowed to carry on. A French subject, he could hardly have been tried for treason in England, but in France he could be, and it would not have been by any means the first time. The Protestant principality of Orange would then have provided a refuge for Constant from the French Catholic forces who were hunting him down. Settling under an assumed name in some larger, sparsely populated region, “as far away as possible from everyone who knows me,” would have been a sensible plan thereafter for this tired, penniless sixty-two-year-old, with the noose tightening around his neck.

  Constant’s intrigues, then, appear to have been catching up with him as he met his undramatic end. Whether Jeanne knew anything about them or not is unknown. For her, in any case, they would have been no more than a footnote now to the huge fact that he had disappeared, leaving them to confront a frightening future, and more immediately a long French winter, with hardly a penny to their name.

  A hundred years later, when Jeanne and her children were past all mortal help, there would be many who claimed that their families came to their aid at this desperate time. Jeanne’s own relatives, forbidden to see her since her marriage to Constant twenty years before, supposedly now stepped forward to assist. There was “a thorny discussion” between the Catholic relatives on Jeanne’s side and the Protestants on Constant’s, with each side wanting the spiritual credit for helping the widow and her orphans, but neither wanting the expense of it. The problem was compounded by the only thing of any substance that Constant had left behind him—apart from the widow and orphans themselves, and probably a certain amount of debt—namely, his dreadful reputation. He had been a felon and a traitor many times over, he was a wanted man, and there might also be creditors trying to reclaim their money. Neither side of the family was eager to be seen to be too closely connected to him.

  Louise and Benjamin de Villette would undoubtedly have come more quickly to the rescue had they not feared implication in Constant’s former intrigues with the English. It is hard to blame them, given what was happening in England at this time. A parliamentary army had risen against the King; the royalist forces had been defeated, and Charles I himself was now a prisoner. The Puritan cavalry commander Oliver Cromwell seemed about to take power in the land. The English Puritans were Calvinists, like France’s Huguenots, like old Agrippa d’Aubigné, who had fled to Geneva under sentence of death, and like Uncle Benjamin and Aunt Louise, now pacing anxiously at Mursay.

  For things had been stirring in France as well. With the King only nine years old, the regency was still in the hands of the Queen Mother, Anne of Austria (herself in fact a Spaniard, with her misleading title reflecting her mixed Habsburg origins). Every noble and commoner knew nonetheless that the real power in the land was the prime minister, Cardinal Mazarin, an unpopular Italian, “subtle and full of trickery,” who had exhausted both province and town with taxes and, perhaps even less wisely, “reduced the bourgeoisie of Paris to despair” by rescinding their rights to certain housing rents and demanding extra money from the wealthiest among them. The Paris parlement, whose membership was almost identical with that of the city’s despairing bourgeoisie, had been regarding the situation with official “impatience.” Mazarin needed the extra money from them, for while the other powers of Europe were seeking peace after thirty years of war, France fought on, determined to batter a weakened Spain back behind her own frontiers and off
the imperial stage for good. But France’s generals could not be relied upon. Many of them were powerful lords in their own right, with their own regional armies, whose men felt more loyalty to them personally than to king or country. The lords resented Mazarin’s concentration of power in his own hands, and they found ready support among peasants and townsmen weighed down by the burden of the Cardinal’s taxes.

  To add to the general sense of instability, the greatest of all the regional lords, the old prince de Condé, had just died, leaving a brilliant and demanding son to uphold the family’s reputation as troublemakers of the first rank. The prince de Condé now was the twenty-six-year-old Louis de Bourbon, victor of the legendary Battle of Rocroi, where he had forced the Spaniards to doff their laurels as Europe’s mythically invincible soldiers once and for all. Condé, a cousin to the King and first among the “princes of the blood,” was as popular as he was powerful, and he was unhappy, particularly with Mazarin, who had recently denied him an admiralty to which he had felt himself entitled. Thirty years before, Condé’s cynical father had made use of the country’s Huguenots to serve his own interests against a little king and his regent mother, and there seemed no reason now why the restless son might not do the same. Once again, allegiance to Protestantism had come to imply disloyalty to the crown, with the daily fear of harassment, imprisonment, or worse.

  Louise and Benjamin’s hesitancy in helping their desperate d’Aubigné relatives is thus understandable, but Jeanne and the children paid a searing price for it. In La Rochelle, in their attic room, they spent three cramped, cold, hungry months in real degradation. There was no fire, for Jeanne had no money to buy wood. At times there was not even money for food. Eighteen-year-old Constant, paralysed by depression, spent his days now, as he had long done, lost in his own grey world. It fell to Charles and Françoise to get the family’s bread, and they got it by going out into the streets, begging coins from strangers. Three times a week they would knock at the doors of a convent or almshouse, and ask for a crust of bread and a bowl of soup—“the pittance,” which a Père Duverger remembered giving to them at the gates of his Jesuit college. Provided they came only every other day, they were not turned away.

  It was a worse time than most to be going begging. The beginnings of political rebellion and a series of poor harvests had dragged the country into recession; in the rural areas, malnutrition was widespread, and many towns were inundated with country folk bereft of the smallest means. The d’Aubignés, though Catholic themselves, were fortunate at least in being in La Rochelle, still predominantly Protestant despite decades of interference from the Catholic hierarchy. In dozens of other French towns, beggars were being rounded up by the thousand and forced into the new hôpitaux, prison-style workhouses founded by the Compagnie du Saint-Sacrement, a secret group of powerful Catholics intent on constraining what they perceived to be the ground forces of social disorder, “gallows meat, from which come thieves, murderers, and all sorts of other good-for-nothing rascals.” The medieval ideal of compassionate Christian almsgiving was fast giving way to an aggressive new mixture of controlled charity and the disciplining of the poor. Françoise and Charles, at twelve and thirteen, were easily old enough to have been set to work sewing or labouring twelve hours a day in one of the grim hôpitaux. Had they known it, the shame of begging might have had its own sharp compensation in the freedom of the cold city streets.

  Charity is a bitter bread, but the soup they received at the convent gates was in fact not always so bad: lots of fat in the water, and salt and herbs, thickened with bread. If they were lucky, instead of the fat there was collar of beef or bacon rinds or sheep’s innards or tripe. On fasting days, which included every Friday, the soup would be meatless, but all going well, there would be peas or beans, with onions and chives and butter; otherwise, only cabbage, or only leeks, or only turnips.

  Thus, with cabbage and fat and sheep’s innards, Jeanne and her children were kept alive until the last days of Advent, the bleak midwinter, when Louise and Benjamin finally relented, or found strength to risk a Catholic reprisal. Thin, dirty, their clothes turning to rags, the four poorest of poor relations closed the door at last on their pitiful attic in La Rochelle. By Christmas, they were safe in the château at Mursay.

  With log fires downstairs, clean beds upstairs, and warm food and kind words every new day, things had taken a decided turn for the better for the d’Aubigné family. Jeanne was at last able to make some plans for a settled future, and she made them very quickly indeed. Within a week or so of their arrival, a delighted Françoise learned that she was to remain at Mursay, while her mother, with heroic determination, returned to Paris to take up her lawsuits yet again. Charles was to go to the city of Poitiers, some forty miles from Niort, to serve as page to a Monsieur de Parabère-Pardaillon, governor of the region and a relative of Jeanne’s friend Madame de Neuillant; he was as happy to go as his sister was to stay. As for Constant, once he had fattened up and recovered his spirits, he was to take up a lieutenancy in the navy alongside his cousin Philippe; unlike the army, where a young officer’s commission could cost tens of thousands of livres, the navy was a cheap way for a boy of good family to begin a promising career. What Constant himself felt about a professional life at sea is not known; he may have dreaded it, or he may have been past caring. Whatever the case, it did not eventuate. The comfort of Mursay and the hopeful new prospect of a good career proved too little, and too late, to help him. A few days into the new year of 1648, Constant was found drowned in the moat surrounding the château—not an accident, it seems, but suicide.

  “All her tenderness was for her elder son, who drowned himself at Mursay,” Françoise’s secretary was later to write. “She didn’t love the others.” Perhaps. There is no knowing whether Jeanne felt more now for her two surviving children, or how deeply they were affected by their brother’s death. At twelve and thirteen, Françoise and Charles were old enough to understand what had happened and to feel some loss, though neither had been close to him. Constant’s emotional life had been lived through his mother, and in large measure hers had been lived through him. To her withdrawn, helpless burden of a son she had extended a daily kindness that she had shown to no one else. He had been able to lean on her unreservedly, and at an age when he might have supported the whole family, he had lived as her dependant. She had protected him and provided for him, as his father had so singularly failed to do for her. In Jeanne’s own staunch Catholic terms, her son’s suicide meant that his soul now writhed in infinite pain, lasting to all eternity, though no doubt she prayed for him, prayed for some impossible exception. But the daily suffering of her firstborn had engendered more or less the only tenderness in Jeanne’s untender life, and his death put an end to it for good.

  It is a pity that tough old Agrippa d’Aubigné had never known his daughter-in-law, for in some respects she was more like him than any of his own flesh and blood. Inured to hardship and misfortune, she did not give up now. She packed Charles off to the Parabère family in Poitiers, where he settled in with wonderful ease, and she herself set out for Paris with her friend Madame de Neuillant, to resume her endless lawsuits. Françoise, as planned, remained behind, ensconced, as she saw it, in paradise.

  Three years and more had passed since she had left her happy life at Mursay, but she slipped back into it without difficulty. Her two eldest cousins were now on the point of marrying, and Aunt Louise placed her in the formal daily care of her own maid, a Madame de Delisle. The governess this time was Françoise herself rather than Madame, who was in fact illiterate. Françoise took great pleasure in teaching her to read and write; there was a lesson every day, but if the teacher had misbehaved at all, the pupil forbade the next day’s lesson. Madame de Delisle had thick greasy hair, which Françoise dressed for her every day—“and I wasn’t revolted,” she later remembered. “I loved her with surprising tenderness. I’ve always loved the people who looked after me.”

  Unsurprisingly, she had no regrets
for her mother, though at first she did miss Charles. But as before, his place was quickly taken by Louise and Benjamin’s youngest, Philippe. Now almost fifteen, Philippe was enjoying a last year of relative leisure at home before taking up his commission in the navy. He was quick to revive his childhood friendship with his “American” cousin, and if it was her choice rather than his to sit feeding vegetable skins to the rabbits or to wander over to the horses and give them their oats, her exotic stories of life on the high seas made him willing enough to oblige her.

  With Aunt Louise, Françoise made regular journeys to nearby Niort, where together they distributed victuals and linen to the poorer folk in the town’s hôpital. It was Françoise’s special task afterwards to stand on the drawbridge of the Niort fortress and hand out food to the beggars waiting there, a piquant duty for a girl so recently a beggar herself. She was well able to appreciate the irony, and the warning, in the situation; though just twelve years old, she had already experienced half a dozen substantial reversals of fortune. Her temperament was active and outgoing; unlike her brother Constant, she had not been beaten down by bad luck and hard times. But she was equally unlike her brother Charles, whose hyperabundant exuberance allowed him to live quite happily from day to day, learning no lesson from his father’s example and brushing off his mother’s concerns. Françoise’s character was more determined, but it was more sensitive, too. The strains of their early years, barely grazing her brother’s thick skin, had cut deeply into her own. An uncertain material life, compounded by her father’s absences and her mother’s antipathy towards her, had left a deep well of insecurity where a bright self-confidence might have been. Adversity had not broken her, but it had left its mark. She was not afraid of hard work or punishments or loneliness; she had not even been afraid of pirates. She had, as she was always to have, great sympathy for the poor, and an empathy with them, too, an empathy in fact too strong for her own well-being. It was only too easy for her to imagine herself standing on the other side of the drawbridge, out-at-elbow once again, pushed aside and shouted at by better-fed townsfolk, begging her bread with a cold and dirty little hand. It was this that Françoise was afraid of, and it was this that she was to fear always, through a lifetime of generosity to others. She was afraid of poverty, and of its ugly sister, humiliation.