The paradise regained at Mursay was not to last. Unknown to Françoise, as to her aunt and uncle, she had been selected to serve as a pawn in the vital seventeenth-century game of getting ahead at court. The strategists were her mother’s friend, the baronne de Neuillant, and her daughter Suzanne de Baudéan, Françoise’s own godmother, now aged eighteen. Though the baronne was wealthy and clever and Suzanne was beautiful, they were not an attractive twosome: one contemporary described them plainly as “the meanest and most avaricious pair the world has ever seen.” Madame de Neuillant had high ambitions for Suzanne, and they were not likely to be realized, she knew, in the depths of the western provinces. For a daughter of the aristocracy, success meant only one thing: marriage to a son of the aristocracy, preferably higher up the ladder than oneself and, naturally, as rich as possible. To attract the attentions of a suitable young man—or an old man, if it came to it—Suzanne needed a position at court.
Her uncle, the baron de Saint-Hermant, Madame de Neuillant’s brother, held the prestigious office of maître d’hôtel ordinaire within the royal household, ensuring the correct provisioning and service of the King’s table. This was a foot firmly in the palace door, but in these years of the regency, with the King himself only ten years old, a young lady’s promotion at court depended on the attention of the powerful and usefully devout Queen Mother. In Françoise, Madame de Neuillant now recognized an excellent means of ingratiating herself with the Queen Mother and putting her daughter forward: here was a little Catholic girl, officially an orphan, since her father was dead, living on the charity of a Huguenot aunt, swallowing all manner of Protestant heresy along with her daily bread. Madame made a formal application to the Queen Mother, requesting permission to take the girl under her own wing and return her once and for all to the faith of her fathers.
The letter served its turn; the pious Queen Mother assented, and a royal lettre de cachet was dispatched to claim Françoise. Although there is no record of Jeanne’s involvement, given her friendship with the baronne and her own devout Catholicism, she had probably agreed to the plan. Louise and Benjamin were not consulted, and against a royal instruction, in any case, there was nothing they could have done. Françoise’s own wishes were not considered at all. In November 1648, an effective kidnappee, she climbed resentfully into Madame de Neuillant’s carriage and was whisked away from beautiful, heretical Mursay. The “meanest and most avaricious pair the world has ever seen” duly received their reward. Suzanne was appointed demoiselle d’honneur at court. She swiftly met the requisite handsome prince (in fact a duke) and married him, to his lasting regret. “Everyone knows what money-grubbers she and her mother were,” an acquaintance recorded, “and how her husband suffered it all in silence.”
The disruption to Françoise’s own life towards the end of 1648 was symptomatic of a more dangerous disruption in the country at large. For social and, perhaps, religious reasons, she had been wrenched out of her pleasant girlhood at Mursay to an unfamiliar and less kindly world. On the wider stage, the matter was above all political. The concentration of power in the King’s hands, set in motion by Henri IV and hugely advanced by Cardinal Richelieu, had been Mazarin’s paramount policy since the beginning of his premiership five years before. For him, as for Richelieu, “the King’s hands” were effectively his own.
But it was not just an egotistical power-grabbing that was now at issue. Regional parlements all over the country, opposed to the principle of absolute monarchy, were resisting Mazarin’s attempts to subject them to the sole authority of the King. The Parlement of Paris was the most resistant of them all. Encouraged, perhaps, by the revolutionary events across the Channel in England, where Oliver Cromwell’s victorious parliamentarians were soon to have King Charles I on trial for his life, the Paris parlementaires—a word newly coined to reflect their newly threatening identity—had finally ceased their customary acquiescence in whatever the Cardinal wanted (in the King’s name), and had begun to make demands of their own. They wanted the right to assemble the lords and high officials to decide affairs of state without the King. They sought the abolition of the intendants, loathed high and low as the King’s representatives and claimers of revenues supposedly due him, even in regions where the royal authority was not recognized. Effectively, the Paris parlementaires wanted to turn the country into a constitutional monarchy, or even a confederation.
With Mazarin distracted by the ongoing war with Spain, and invasion from the Spanish Netherlands a daily possibility, the parlementaires had grown ever more daring. But in August 1648, a brilliant victory over the Spaniards at Lens by the mercurial prince de Condé gave Mazarin a breathing space to turn the tables on them. Within a week, he arrested three of their leaders in a clumsy pounce on their way home from the victory service at the cathedral of Nôtre-Dame. One escaped; one of the prison carriages broke down, and a helpful passerby recognized the parlementaire Broussel, despite his captors’ attempt to disguise him as a bankrupt en route to the debtors’ jail. “They had been intending to have them tried straightaway,” the Dutch diplomat de Wicquefort reported on the same day to his princely masters in Germany. Mazarin and the Queen Mother were at once seen to be behind it all, and the crowds assembled for the victory celebrations swiftly turned into a furious mob. “Within half an hour the whole town more or less had risen up and dragged chains out to block the streets. The people were calling for Monsieur Broussel to be brought back. They were calling him their father and saying some really insulting things about the [King’s] ministers.”
The rioting did not stop. Incited by regional parlementaires and fuelled by successive bad harvests and general resentment against Mazarin’s high taxes, it gradually spread through most of the country, no longer a riot but a real uprising, and eventually civil war. This was the first Fronde, la Fronde du Parlement; it lasted more than six months, and led in the end to the King’s troops besieging their own capital.
The ten-year-old King himself had been spirited away from the city in the middle of a January night, together with his mother, his nine-year-old brother Philippe, his gouty and complaining uncle, the duc d’Orléans, and, of course, Cardinal Mazarin. With the royal family safely out of the way, though “doing without everything” at their unprepared château of Saint-Germain fifteen miles away, the siege of Paris began. As dawn broke on the very next morning of January 6, 1649, the prince de Condé led the royalist troops to their positions outside the town, with his own twenty-year-old brother, Conti, “a jealous, unthinking, undersized hunchback,” leading the rebels inside.
For more than two months, no provisions were allowed into Paris, though messengers went back and forth: the Queen Mother instructed the parlementaires to disperse; the parlementaires refused, and instructed the Queen Mother to send the King back; the Queen Mother refused. The parlementaires took a bold step further: “Since Cardinal Mazarin is known to be the author of all the disorders of the State and of our present misfortune,” they wrote, “the Parlement has declared and declares him disturber of the public peace and enemy of the King and his State. He is enjoined to leave the Court this day, and within one week to leave the kingdom. This time having elapsed, all subjects of the King are enjoined to hunt him down.” “In the whole Parlement of nearly two hundred persons,” de Wicquefort reported, “there were only three who disagreed with this, and some even suggested there should be a price on his head of 100,000 écus.” But although the decree enjoining him to go was announced “to the sound of trumpet” and printed and relayed everywhere, the determined Cardinal stayed put.
In early March of 1649, the Queen Mother agreed that four days’ provisions might be permitted into the city, in order to give the parlementaires strength to sign a peace treaty. Compromises were to be made on both sides, with a few more on the parliamentary side; when the final treaty was delivered from Saint-Germain, it was found to have been signed on the King’s behalf by his mother and his uncle, and also by Cardinal Mazarin. This unexpected insult left the P
arlement in no doubt that Mazarin would thereafter be as powerful as he had ever been. After months of fighting and hardship, they had effectively returned to a shamefaced status quo ante. Sighing over lost principles, but anxious, too, about lost profits, one by one they quieted their martial rhetoric and slipped back into their business clothes. They signed the treaty a few days later.
A two-month siege of their capital had sufficed to dispel the political principles of the parlementaires, and Madame de Neuillant’s interest in Françoise had faded with equal swiftness. For a few weeks after capturing her in November 1648, she had taken the trouble to parade her around the province in a carriage and six, posing as her rescuer from heresy. But once everyone of influence had seen the girl and congratulated the baronne on her recapture for the true faith, and with Suzanne’s marriage concluded, Françoise had effectively served her purpose. Madame did not want to keep her at home; she had another daughter there already, a second girl to feed and clothe and marry off, and besides, Françoise was wilful: though formally Catholic, she would not take the sacraments and would not even join in the family’s daily devotions. As with the incident with her mother at the altar of the Catholic church in Paris, this probably reflected more stubbornness than determination to take any particular religious stand. Thirteen years old, penniless, and now friendless, Françoise seized on the power of refusal, recognizing it as her only power.
She wanted to go home to Mursay, but, though Madame de Neuillant was as eager to be rid of her as Françoise was to be gone, this would have been too clear an admission of sectarian failure on the baronne’s part. Clearly, the girl could not stay, but neither could she be sent back. At length the baronne resolved the problem in the time-honoured way. For a gently bred Catholic girl with no money of her own and no husband on the horizon, there was only one suitable place: Françoise was duly deposited inside the gates of the local convent.
It was not so very terrible a fate. The Niort convent was part of the Ursuline order, still fairly new in France and even rather fashionable. The Ursulines were teaching nuns, devoted to the education of girls, a still innovative idea at a time when fine needlework and a smattering of music was the best the most fortunate could hope for. Even among the well-to-do, few parents bothered to teach their daughters anything more challenging than basic literacy and a handful of vaguely Christian principles, mostly pertaining to modesty in the company of men. The successful running of a household was commonly left to the chance of finding good servants, and the management of a landed estate, the eventual responsibility of many gentry women, remained to most a mystery. One lady of the time congratulated herself on having acquired a fine Venetian mirror in exchange for “a lot of wretched fields that did nothing but grow corn.” There was no tradition as yet of the skilled foreign governess with her geography and history books and her built-in second language. Girlhood was generally spent in servitude or indolence, according to social standing.
Against a background of this kind, the quiet Ursulines in their graceful black habits could almost be counted radicals. At the turn of the century, they had been no more than a loosely organized community of devout laywomen committed to female education, but by the time of Françoise’s girlhood, the Ursulines had become a formal religious order, living in convents under the triple vow of poverty, chastity, and obedience, with an added fourth vow, still rare among nuns, of dedication to the education of young girls. Though the sisters lived strictly, their teaching methods were progressive, drawing on the highly successful and often brilliant techniques developed by the Jesuits in recent decades. As far as possible, each girl was taught according to her talents and inclination, from a conventional but flexible repertoire of subjects: “reading, writing, needlework, housekeeping, and all sorts of arts useful for a respectable woman of the gentry.” All of this served the overarching purpose of Ursuline education: preparation for Christian motherhood. It was the surest way, the sisters believed, to ensure the salvation of mankind: “Young girls will reform their families, their families will reform their provinces, their provinces will reform the world.”
There were about thirty girls resident in the Niort convent, all, like Françoise, demoiselles (young girls of good family), and some hundred more who came each day for lessons at no charge. On Sundays, poor girls of the district arrived for training in the domestic arts that would secure them a living in service. Every girl, rich or poor, received instruction in Catholic beliefs and Christian living: nothing exegetical or theological that might encourage any real thinking—one mother superior, indeed, had recently been reprimanded for her too-enquiring approach and instructed to “confine her intellect to simple things”—but enough to make her a dutiful wife and mother, and a good benefactress of her community, if she had the means, or a faithful servant within it, if she had not. The better-off girls received training as well in the social graces they would need in years to come as the wives of prominent men.
The daily regime of the thirty pensionnaires was modelled on the nuns’ own community life, and it is a straightforward story, as one contemporary recorded:
The girls got up at 6, washed and dressed (a nun would help the little ones), a good deal of attention was paid to hygiene, such as washing of hands before meals and a mouthwash after meals. Mass was at 7, breakfast and recreation at 7.30. Lessons began at 8.15 and lasted until 10. Dinner was at 10.30, preceded by prayers. Lessons were resumed at 12.15 until 2, when Vespers were said and the girls had a bite to eat. At 3 there was catechism teaching for a quarter of an hour, followed by needlework for an hour. Then there was reading and again catechism until 5 when supper was served and bedtime was 7.
Françoise was at first resistant to these highly structured charms of convent life. To a rebellious thirteen-year-old, the place seemed a prison of petty regulations, and the nuns themselves infantile. Regarding their newest charge as a child still, they promised her a holy picture if she would agree to “convert” formally and make her first Communion. “Well of course with a holy picture on offer, I was bound to agree,” she noted mockingly. Reconsidering their approach, the nuns sent for a priest to persuade her by rational argument, “but she gave as good as she got, with the Bible in front of her,” familiarity with the scriptures being a hallmark of Protestant upbringing. Françoise stood her ground with some pride, but it brought her little comfort. With the winter setting in, she was miserable day and night in the freezing stone convent cells. Only an intangible heat emanated from the little furnace of resentment inside her, and every thought of the callous baronne, and of the lost kindness of Aunt Louise, kept it burning.
Confined and dispirited, at length she fell ill, and the illness proved a turning point. She was given into the charge of one of the younger nuns, a Sister Céleste, who nursed her carefully and kindly back to health. The little dual-heretic, not really Protestant and not yet quite Catholic, could not help responding to this new motherly tenderness of which she was so much in need. Sister Céleste, intelligent and perceptive, understood the girl’s strong but sensitive nature, and set about to win her over by sympathy and a gentle persuasion. As Françoise returned to her lessons, she remained in the young nun’s special care, and Sister Céleste made judicious use of her position. Françoise need not tire herself by studying the catechism, said Sister Céleste, though perhaps she would enjoy reading these beautiful poetic psalms. She need not do any sewing of shirts or aprons, but she might like to help with the colourful embroidery for the priestly vestments. She need not even attend mass if she did not care to, though all the other girls would be there, and she might not want to be the only one left out. Beloved Aunt Louise had vanished, but here in her place was Sister Céleste. Within a few weeks Françoise was more or less in love.
“I loved her more than I can say,” she related long afterwards to the young girls then in her own care. “I had no greater pleasure than to sacrifice myself in her service.” It is the language of the martyr and the lover, peculiarly apt for a clever and lonely
thirteen-year-old desperately in need of some kind of tenderness and some kind of faith. “Sacrificing herself” for Sister Céleste became the object of Françoise’s daily life. There were not many demands for heroism within the confines of an Ursuline boarding school, but Françoise did her utmost to turn straw into gold: there was extra laundry and sewing and ironing to be done, the little girls had to be put to bed, others needed help with their lessons, there were things to be gone without—candles, fruit, sleep—so that Sister Céleste might have more of them.
It was a customary practice among the Ursulines to have the older and brighter pupils helping with the younger ones; Françoise was one of these dizainières, with ten girls in her charge, under the general supervision of one of the nuns. She seems to have excelled at it; the sisters were more than satisfied with her, and, more surprisingly perhaps, “the girls liked me very much”—her own claim, but borne out by many subsequent affections. From the Ursulines, Françoise had learned two great pedagogical truths: that empathy is a powerful teacher, and that gentleness can be more persuasive than force. In later life she was often to appeal to these same principles, though it must be said that her actions did not always match her words. But for the moment, the nuns’ methods resonated perfectly with her own needs, and they produced as well a small local victory for the Catholic Church’s educational army: “Little by little,” said Françoise, “I became a Catholic.”
The Secret Wife of Louis XIV: Françoise d'Aubigné, Madame de Maintenon Page 7