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

by Veronica Buckley

  Little by little, life with the Ursulines had turned from misery to happiness. But even this austere idyll was not to last. At the end of her first three-month term, it emerged that Françoise’s fees to the convent had not been paid. The “meanest and most avaricious” Madame de Neuillant had declined to pay them, observing coolly that she herself was no relation to the girl, after all. With impressive effrontery, she had forwarded the bill to Louise, whose generous heart was for once overcome by its own devout Protestantism: she simply refused to pay for her niece’s Catholic education. The nuns expended some effort going back and forth between possible benefactors who might allow Françoise to stay, but it was to no avail; no one seems to have considered that she might stay on as one of the hundred or so day-girls, who paid no fees at all; probably her higher status as a demoiselle perversely worked against her in this respect. So, with the spring blossoms budding in the convent garden, she was finally escorted through the great wooden gates. She left Sister Céleste weeping behind them.

  “I thought I’d die of grief,” Françoise recalled. “For two or three months I prayed night and day that God would take me. I didn’t know how I could live without seeing her.” Her passion for Sister Céleste, and the young nun’s reciprocating fondness for her, took the only course now open—a voluminous correspondence. But moral support was not much help. Françoise was back, unwilling and unwanted, with Madame de Neuillant in Niort.

  Fortunately, she was not the only child in the governor’s grand house. The youngest of the baronne’s children, a girl named Angélique, was about her own age; a “late child,” she was not much loved by her worldly mother. Though very distantly related, and only by marriage, the two girls called each other cousin in the manner of their region, and to this pair was often added a third in the person of Angélique’s actual cousin, Bérénice de Baudéan. Each day they would be sent out, with little masks on their noses to protect them from sunburn, to drive the governor’s turkey cocks as far as a little fountain on his grounds. “They gave us big sticks to keep them from going where they shouldn’t,” Françoise related, “and a wicker basket, with our lunch in it, and a little book.” The little book was required reading for every gently bred young person in the kingdom: Pibrac’s Quatrains, already more than sixty-five years old and surely less than thrilling for a trio of thirteen-year-old girls:

  Changeable are the blessings of health

  Quivering is the voice of fame

  Fortune never remains the same

  Virtue alone is our only wealth.

  This and another 125 similarly worthy verses were set for the three to learn by heart, a dozen or so daily, a stodgy dessert after their lunch of bread and cheese. They digested both in the same place every day, a natural grotto overlooking the governor’s meadows, before shepherding the turkey cocks back home.

  Françoise, as the poor relation, had extra work to do, doling out hay for the six carriage horses that had once carried her triumphantly around the district. She was back in wooden clogs, just as she had been as a tiny girl at Mursay, though Madame de Neuillant shrewdly gave her shoes to put on whenever there were dinner guests. Although she was now a widow, the baronne had suffered no loss of standing in the district—her late husband’s governorship had been deftly taken up by her son. Their grand house was full of servants, and also of visitors on every kind of public and private business, and despite the baronne’s efforts, there was not much that passed unnoticed. “The girl was a relative of hers,” noted one gentleman from Paris, “but Madame de Neuillant gave her next to nothing to wear. She was so stingy that the girl had only a single brazier for warmth in her room.” Françoise remained in the house for the next eighteen months, and for the whole of the eighteen months she was kept firmly in her place—shivering in a cold bedroom or working in the stables, and when at dinner, at the bottom of the table, in which humble place she sat every day in silence, being forbidden to speak.

  But though she said nothing, she listened to everything and watched everything, and there was plenty to see and hear. It was the governor’s residence, after all, and anyone in the region with pretensions to influence or culture sooner or later arrived at the door. As often as not they stayed to dinner, an afternoon meal at this period and the main repast of the day, with various courses of meat, fish, and fruits, and ample opportunity for serious talk or witty stories or simple gossip. And if Françoise noticed all that was going on about her, as the months passed, she in her turn began to be noticed, too, in her metamorphosis from a hesitant girl into a beautiful young woman.

  At fourteen years of age, Françoise was already fully grown, a lovely brunette “with very beautiful black eyes,” womanly in her figure, intelligent, and, though she said next to nothing, an evident appreciator of lively and witty conversation. Her clothes were hand-me-downs and her skirts often too short for her, and her hands were rather rough, it seems, an unsurprising blemish, given her daily work. But this could not detract from the charm which she exuded from her poor relation’s end of the table. The governor’s visitors shook their heads that such a lovely girl, being penniless, should have so bleak a life before her. But the women liked her for her modest appearance and quiet, graceful ways, and the men were drawn to her for simpler reasons.

  Among the very first of her admirers was Antoine Gombaud de Plassac, more generally known as the chevalier de Méré, a native of the Poitou region himself and a frequent visitor at the governor’s residence in Niort. When he first met Françoise, in 1649, he was in his early forties and quite a glamorous figure, a former soldier and now a man of letters, supporting his mother and five of his seven siblings on the earnings of his (unremarkable) poetry, and on friendly terms with the various luminaries of Parisian literary society. The chevalier had a touch of the rake about him, too: he was an enthusiastic gambler, unfortunately with very little money to stake, but to help him with this passion he had engaged the services of a brilliant young mathematician, still in his mid-twenties: none other than Blaise Pascal. The chevalier was interested in probability—more precisely, the probability of winning at cards—but in its purest mathematical form the subject proved equally absorbing for the profoundly religious Pascal. He began a correspondence about it with Pierre de Fermat, and between them the genius pair swiftly solved the chevalier’s problem, at least on paper. They carried on to establish the principles of probability theory together, and the chevalier continued a more confident gambler—though, perversely, never any richer.

  Françoise was flattered by the chevalier’s attentions to her, and soon accepted the designation of his écolière (pupil) in French literature, Spanish, and Italian—“She understood Spanish and Italian very well”—and probably some of the classics: the chevalier, an able scholar, knew Greek and Latin, in the manner of a gentleman of the day, and also, unusually, Arabic. The lessons, often conducted by letter, were interspersed with fulsome expressions of praise for the pupil, who was still only fourteen years old. “If you were simply the loveliest and most delightful person in the world…” the chevalier began. “But you have so many other more precious qualities that, when one writes to you or speaks to you, it’s hard not to be rather afraid of you. I find in you something so rare and pure, I can’t imagine that even the finest man there’s ever been would deserve your attention.” The chevalier, it is clear, was more than a little in love with Françoise, but his admiration of her inner qualities, that “something so rare and pure,” was genuine, too. Beyond the secondhand clothes and weathered hands, he saw the diamond in the rough, and he was determined to polish it.

  “I would really like her to be your écolière, too,” he wrote to his friend, the duchesse de Lesdiguières. “She’s worthy of whatever good training she receives…She’s not only very beautiful, with a beauty one never tires of, but sweet-natured, appreciative, discreet, reliable, modest, intelligent…” The duchesse, famed in Parisian society for the elegance of her manners, had thought of taking “this young Indian girl” with her
on a journey to southern France. “If you had taken her away with you,” the chevalier declared, “she would have returned—a masterpiece!”

  Thirty years later, when the promptings of passion had long given way to the fond recollections of a proud teacher, the chevalier de Méré would write, and publish, a letter reminding Françoise that he had been “the first to give you proper instruction, and if I may say so, without wishing to flatter you, I never saw a more delightful girl than you, for your personal charms as well as for the warmest heart in the world, and the cleverest head.”

  It may have been the chevalier’s admiration of her niece that now reawakened Madame de Neuillant’s determination to get rid of her. Evidently, the girl was grown up; she was attractive; it was time to marry her off. The chevalier himself, an obvious candidate despite the thirty-year difference in their ages, had not stepped forward, nor was he likely to. His impractical father having mismanaged a fine estate to the edge of bankruptcy, the chevalier was obliged to live more or less on his wits, and lacked the means to found a gentry family.

  Françoise, of course, had no dowry of her own, and besides, the baronne still had her own daughter Angélique on her hands. There was no use having the pair of them competing in the same small town of Niort for the same small circle of men. With the autumn approaching, she packed both girls into her carriage, “between the hard-boiled eggs and the brown bread,” and set off for Paris, Angélique to acquire some polish at court with her sister, and Françoise to be disposed of, not in marriage, however, but once again in a convent.

  The Ursuline house stood outside the medieval walls, towards the southern limits of the city, in the rue Saint-Jacques. Deposited at the gates, Françoise showed her mettle. Outraged by Madame de Neuillant’s rejection of her and frustrated by her own powerlessness, she gave the baronne no farewell, but hurled herself inside “before anyone could tell me to get in.” But all the same, the gates were locked behind her.

  If Madame de Neuillant had expected this second convent spell to cure Françoise of her headstrong “Protestant” ways, at first there seemed no chance of it. She began by refusing to speak—so determinedly, in fact, that the nuns concluded that the girl must be mute. Conferring with the baronne, they discovered the deception and increased the pressure. Françoise responded by going on hunger strike. The nuns remained unmoved; fasting, they pointed out, was standard mortification of the flesh, part of the usual repertoire for them all. They themselves often ate only the leftovers from the girls’ own meals. Françoise reconsidered. Resistance was evidently futile. A tactical appearance of defeat was bound to be the quickest way out. She adopted a submissive pose and, on the highly unorthodox assurance that Protestant Aunt Louise would not be damned to everlasting fire, she finally agreed to make her first Communion.

  Before communicating, she made an outwardly humble confession and afterwards wrote a letter, not very humble at all, to her brother Charles, gloating that she had “beaten you to it, even though you’re a year older than me.” She had the grace to admit, all the same, that the gloating itself was unfortunate evidence of a lack of any real “conversion” to a life of Catholic piety.

  Although from now on there was to be no going back to the Huguenot ways she had learned at Mursay, Françoise was never to be a thoroughgoing Catholic in the manner of her mother or even Madame de Neuillant. She was a believer and would remain so; indeed, she could hardly have been otherwise in this century of staunch belief, where even Newton and Galileo and other men of the daring new natural sciences could remain devout. She believed in God, and accepted, at least outwardly, the Catholic forms of practise, but she was never to be able to swallow the orthodoxy whole. Sitting with Charles, discussing the anguishing subject of hell, and perhaps thinking of their elder brother, she had remarked, “I think God will change His mind. He won’t leave the damned in the flames forever.”

  Less than a month after making her first Communion, Françoise was released from the convent into the pulsing city of Paris. A few streets and a world away, in the cul-de-sac Saint-Dominique, behind the Palais d’Orléans, stood the bourgeois house of Madame de Neuillant’s brother, Pierre Tiraqueau, baron de Saint-Hermant. The baronne had been renting the third floor of this house for some time, and it was here that a happier Françoise was now transferred. Although her skirts were still too short and she had to bed down with the servants, she had won a first solid victory against the powers of chance and force which had until now served her so ill. Here, in the baron’s overflowing house, she had found a small space of her own.

  Four

  Burlesque

  Paris…is…one of the most gallant cities in the world; large in circuit, of a round form, very populous, but situated in a bottom, environed with gentle declivities, rendering some places very dirty, and making it smell as if sulphur were mingled with the mud; yet it is paved with a kind of freestone, of near a foot square, which renders it more easy to walk on than our pebbles in London.

  So wrote the English diarist John Evelyn, a cautious admirer of the great city that was now Françoise’s home. It was early in the autumn of 1650, and she was just turning fifteen.

  If the city she had come to was noisy and dirty, it was at least, if only temporarily, a city at peace. The Fronde had ended, or so it seemed, and Françoise’s own arrival in Paris had been preceded, only weeks before, by the return of the twelve-year-old King and his royal court, a likely incentive in itself for Madame de Neuillant, with Angélique to marry off, to settle in the city once again. The King had been warmly received in Paris, but, despite the Queen Mother’s apparent victory over the parlementary frondeurs, behind the scenes it was the opportunistic prince de Condé who was in fact pulling the strings. “All the same, the anti-Mazarin faction shouldn’t rejoice just yet,” the physician Gui Patin wrote presciently to a friend in Lyon. “There’s very little reason to trust this prince…We’ll see some thunderbolt falling on someone’s head this winter.”

  The court had been reestablished, not in the Palais-Royal, as before the Fronde, but in the vast, fortress-like palace of the Louvre. Still under construction after a hundred years of building, the Louvre contained, in addition to all its noble apartments, a beehive of ateliers—studios for the scores of artists and craftsmen working to complete the palace, inside and out, and for others of their fraternities enjoying royal patronage. The Louvre’s south façade, spreading alongside the Seine, faced the île de la cité, cradle of ancient Paris and a crossroads now for the life of the modern city. At the eastern end, the old palace of the Capeit kings had already disappeared, though two grand vestiges remained in the prison of the Conciergerie, and in the Gothic jewel of the Sainte-Chapelle, a dazzling reliquary for Jesus’ crown of thorns, sold to the French King four hundred years before by the shrewd Emperor of Constantinople for three times the cost of the chapel itself. And at the island’s eastern edge, lowering across the river, stood the cathedral of Nôtre-Dame, a massive assertion of the power and the weight of the Catholic Church at the very heart of France. In the shadow of Nôtre-Dame, black-gowned Sorbonne scholars battled the muscular forces of the new empirical science with the rusting weapons of the middle ages. And in between them all, in the fetid alleyways and crooked medieval streets, still serving equally as thoroughfare and rubbish dump, the “little people” of Paris plied their daily trades: butchers and bakers, blacksmiths and ironmongers, apothecaries, tailors, signwriters and scribes, potters and printers and prostitutes. Thoroughfare and rubbish dump, too, was the city’s wide river of the Seine, and its banks were alive with everyday commerce.

  Most of the great gates to the city still functioned, manned by armed but bribable customs officers and closed at midnight by the raising of rickety drawbridges. But the medieval walls encircling the “round form” of old Paris were gradually being broken down and broken through. Beside the walls, beyond them, even on top of them, sprawled the stalls of petty traders and the shacks of new arrivals from the countryside, tramping in wi
th their sacks and carts, their provincial accents and provincial habits. As urban life pushed outwards and country life pushed in, the old walls which had confined the city for centuries strained to contain the uncontainable. Paris was bursting at the seams.

  Native-born Parisians looked haughtily down on the newcomers from the countryside, though their city was as yet no oasis of urbanity: all its dwellers, rich and poor, lived more or less equally prone to dirt, violence, and sudden illness. The city’s infamous stinking mud competed with every kind of waste, animal and human, to smear unwary shoes and stockings. Family chamber pots were routinely emptied into the unlit streets, already strewn with the refuse of a thousand cottage industries. Water, barely clean, was actually rationed; ordinary folk received about one quart per day, with inevitable results for personal health and hygiene. The city was full of animals: horses and mules for transport and cartage, cows and pigs and every kind of poultry for food and feathers and skins: flocks of sheep still grazed the Champs-Élysées, making those grassy fields “most unpleasant for those on foot, particularly if there’s been a bit of rain.”

  The Parisian manière was scarcely more refined. The troubles of the Fronde had disrupted the already slack policing of public order, and gangs of young men, many of them still in military service, swaggered unchallenged about the town, harassing the young women and threatening everyone else. Gentlemen might carry spare footwear when making private visits, but many still needed handbooks of gentility to remind them “not to spit inside” at home they beat their children and servants, and their wives, too, with impunity. Though a little better informed, perhaps, and less bound to the rituals of land and season, the native Parisians were not so very different in habit or temper from their country cousins. All gave substance and spice to the thick potage of a great city in the making.