“It would take too long to record all the details of the things she did to help the poor,” wrote a later secretary. Françoise’s personal income, which included a 48,000-livre pension from the King, was by now in the order of 90,000 livres per annum, and every year, some two-thirds of this sum was distributed to her many charitable concerns.
In individual terms, however, the greatest beneficiary by far of her charity was still her wastrel brother Charles. There was barely a week without a letter to him, and barely a letter without a promise of money or some other help: “I’m sending you the fifteen pistoles that you owe the prince” “I’ll look for a house for you, and pay half the rent” “If the furniture that you have of mine is any good for [either of your residences], you’re most welcome to keep it” “I’ll send you a manservant; you’re quite right to want a tall one; short ones are no use at all.” In a single year, as she reminded him, she had provided his wife with no less than 2,661 livres’ worth of clothes: “one brown satin skirt, embroidered, 330 livres; one pink muslin skirt, ninety-four livres; one flame-coloured bodice, thirty-eight livres; four pairs of shoes and two pairs of slippers, forty livres…—and this is not to reproach you, or to ask for repayment, but only to show that money goes quickly for people like you…”
If Charles had sensed the exasperation in his sister’s tone, it had done nothing to change him. He was an incorrigible spendthrift, or rather, an incorrigible acquirer of things for which he could not pay. Three months after her letter about money going quickly, Françoise was alarmed to learn that he had been involved in a rough altercation with creditors in Paris, one of whom had turned up at Versailles to complain to her in person. The resultant letter reveals not only her frustration with Charles, but also some anxiety for herself:
I’m really sorry to be going on at you all the time, but who’s going to speak frankly to you if not me? I have been informed of some dealings you’ve had which are neither fair nor honest. It’s too late to be bargaining over prices once you’ve been arrested—you just have to pay up. Paris tradesmen aren’t afraid of violence; they make even the greatest men pay. It’s understandable if you don’t always have the whole sum you owe to hand, but in that case you come to some arrangement with them and pay what you can, and once they see you mean to pay in the end, they’ll stop harassing you. This sort of thing damages a family’s reputation. You really have to stop doing it, without making any more trouble. It’s doing more harm to you than it is to them.
Though Françoise did not say it, and though Charles would hardly have cared if she had, his impossible behaviour was doing harm to her as well, embarrassing her at court and reminding people of the unflattering “first volume of her life.” No number of woollen gowns for poor girls was going to make up for the gossiping and sniggering of better-born courtiers, and no amount of effort for the new Versailles charity was going to change the attitude of its resentful directress, “Madame la duchesse de Richelieu,” who, as had already been observed, would have preferred Françoise to remain an object of charity herself.
Queen without a crown, perched on a pedestal built on sand, Françoise needed something solid, something unignorable, to impress the snobbish and disparaging people around her, and to engage their respect once and for all. She needed a domain of her own. With local charity dominated by the antagonistic duchesse de Richelieu, she turned to the only other avenue open to an ambitious and respectable woman of the day: she turned to education. Here, at least, she could feel secure.
For several years already, she had been involved in a project for the education of poor children, particularly girls. In 1681, with the help of her friend Marie de Brinon, she had established a small school, first in the town of Montmorency and later in Rueil, both a few miles distant from Paris. From the outset, the vivacious Madame de Brinon had served as the school’s superintendent and headmistress. Intelligent and energetic, a former Ursuline nun, she had been devoted to the school, as indeed she was to Françoise. Mixed in with her enthusiasm and her steady religious principles was a touch of the renegade, which amused Françoise and endeared La Brinon to her, though at times it cast doubt on her administrative capacities. “You can’t think highly enough of her, and you can’t love her too much,” she had relayed to Père Gobelin. “But you have to watch her; she comes up with wild ideas. Afterwards, she’ll reconsider, like a lamb, but you have to keep her on a tight rein at first.”
Things had begun humbly at Montmorency and Rueil, with most provisions begged or borrowed, at least as far as Françoise could bear to solicit them: “We mustn’t lose the least bench or the smallest straw chair; everything will be of use to us; and then we’ll have to ask for less, which is the best thing of all as far as I’m concerned…In this country you must do nothing but wait for the right time, without letting it be seen that you’re even dreaming of wanting something for yourself.” So she had urged Madame de Brinon from her sickbed at Versailles, to which she had frustratingly been confined with a haemorrhoid crisis.
The little school had met with such success that, early in 1684, it was moved to larger premises in Noisy, near Versailles. This brought the project much closer to Françoise, and, though day-to-day responsibility remained with Madame de Brinon, Françoise maintained a directorial hold on everything. With every Saturday morning’s post, enthusiastic directions went flying from Versailles to Noisy: “Keep what wood you need and pay for it. I don’t want any trace of cheating; that sort of thing gets back to the King, and we have to make sure he has a good opinion of us.” “It’s not that I’m looking to save money; I want to save time, and establish a way of doing things, once and for all.” “We mustn’t forget anything, since we’ll be spied on, by those who wish us well and those who don’t.” “I don’t know where to place the sacristy…We mustn’t spoil the symmetry from the outside…”—an ironic consideration, given her despairing sigh about having to perish from the cold in symmetry in her own rooms at Versailles.
Madame de Brinon had been assisted at Noisy by three former Ursuline nuns of her own choosing, and though Françoise had been satisfied with this choice in educational terms—“It’s true that I like the Ursulines…”—the sisters’ physical care of the girls was failing to meet the expected standard, as a visit of one little pupil to Versailles had made only too clear: “I’m sending her back to you,” wrote Françoise to Madame de Brinon in February 1684. “I’m most disappointed at what’s happened here, which all the servants and [the physician] Monsieur Fagon know about. [My maid] Nanon…wanted to do her hair; she had to cut it like a cap, and as the hair fell from her head it was moving, there were so many lice in it; her face was so covered with them that some even went into her mouth…I hold you to blame for the little care you’re taking with all these beggar-girls…”
In the very next month, March of 1684, the King had agreed to the establishment of the new Versailles charity under Madame de Richelieu’s direction, and Françoise realized that in order to set her own stamp on things, she would have to aim higher than the little school at Noisy. Reviewing the facts, she quickly concluded that the limitation lay not in herself or her ideas, nor even in Madame de Brinon’s faulty administration, but rather in the choice they had made of their working material. Beggar-girls, whether crawling with lice or not, would never be much more than beggar-girls—laundry-maids or scullery-maids, perhaps, milkmaids if they were lucky. A very pretty and clever one might reach the pinnacle of service and become a lady’s maid, dressing in her mistress’s cast-off gowns and keeping her hands soft until she married some coachman or valet.
It was useful work, to give these girls some schooling; it gave them a means of keeping themselves and saved them from the worst, as Françoise knew from her own harsh experience as a hungry, dirty beggar-girl herself. An extraordinary mix of talent and effort and luck had raised her up from this pitiable place, but such an ascension was unlikely to be repeated. The little school at Noisy, even with improved administration, would never be more t
han an example of charitable work; Madame de Richelieu could easily do as much in Versailles.
Françoise wanted something more prominent, something impressive and influential, something that no one else had done. She would need more money, much more money, and much more, too, than “the least bench or the smallest straw chair” that she and Madame de Brinon had begged and borrowed for the little school. The idea of a school was right, given “the talent that I have for the education of children,” as she had written to the wife of her cousin Philippe, in supposed justification of the capture of her sons and daughter. For this larger, more influential school, beggar-girls would not do. Françoise needed girls with real potential for eventual prominence and influence. She needed demoiselles.
And after all, if she had been a beggar-girl, she had been a demoiselle, too. Her treacherous, murderous father had also been “the high and mighty Monseigneur Constant d’Aubigné, chevalier, lord of Surimeau and other places.” “I’m a lady”: so she had insisted, even as a six-year-old in her father’s prison cell.
Here before her now was a chance, of a kind, to remake her own poor-but-noble girlhood. The country was full of impoverished aristocrats and their dowryless, futureless daughters. Here was work for her; here would be her domain. Here she would provide what should have been provided for her: care and kindness in a suitable environment, a proper education, pretty gowns to wear, and a good dowry when she came to marry. She had missed every bit of it, but her new protégées, her little demoiselle second selves—they would have it all.
Today the King signed the letters patent for the establishment of the community of Saint-Cyr…Madame de Maintenon will have the general direction of it…The demoiselles and the dames must prove a nobility of three grandparents, or a hundred years…
Thus the marquis de Dangeau, on the sixth day of June 1686. Work had begun on the building two years previously, with Louis’s instruction to Jules Hardouin-Mansart, one of his own Versailles architects, to locate a suitable site for it. Mansart chose a large terrain near the village of Saint-Cyr, a few miles to the west of Versailles itself. There was a great deal of underground water at the site, he said, a necessity for an institution intended to house several hundred people. Françoise objected to the site for the very same reason: in her view, the underground water would make the place constantly damp, and it would be impossible to keep the cellars from flooding.
She lost the argument, and in the spring of 1685 construction began on the swampy terrain. Water was pumped out of the ground by huge new machines, and work proceeded at the frenetic pace now usual for buildings of a royal stamp, so that in only fifteen months the 2,500 workmen, reinforced by a contingent of soldiers, had brought Mansart’s drawings and diagrams to life. “It was all built so quickly, there were lots of mistakes made: they didn’t even leave time for the greenwood to dry out,” said the abbé de Choisy, but though the building remained without much decoration, in the end it was no less impressive for that—even Liselotte was obliged to admit that it was “a fine big building.” A restrained château in creamy stone, it was curiously suitable for an institution of Françoise’s own: all that was needed was there, with nothing extraneous to disturb its quiet harmony. Her own room, next to the simple chapel, overlooked the gardens of fruit trees and flowers, but also, in keeping with her practical temperament, it adjoined the girls’ dormitories and the rooms of the teaching dames.
The building of Saint-Cyr had cost 1.4 million livres, a quarter of the annual construction costs of Versailles. A further 100,000 livres per year were provided for its maintenance; another 100,000 or so would be raised annually from the estate granted to it.
Though overruled about the actual site of the new school, Françoise had involved herself in every other possible aspect of its development. Battling a cold and laryngitis and rheumatism in her draughty Versailles rooms, in early April 1686 she wrote to Père Gobelin of “the great increase in the amount of work I have to do,” but her tone is more excited than complaining. “Madame de Maintenon entered into the smallest details with a capacity and patience very much exceeding her sex,” noted the abbé de Choisy admiringly, “but in this case it was necessary. There were so many difficulties constantly arising…”
A less sympathetic observer regarded Françoise’s overactivity simply as evidence of a maladie des directions—essentially, a need to control everything, with its usual concomitant unwillingness to delegate any real responsibility to anyone else. Certainly, her letters in the months before the opening of the new school reveal an attention to details that might have been left to others among the thirty-six teaching staff and thirty-four live-in servants now being employed for Saint-Cyr: “Sister Martha is to share a room with the other sister from Montoire…” “Sister Madeleine can sew…” “I agree with you about our baker; the bread is always baked on the outside and soggy in the middle.” “I’m not sure about the cows. If you have cows, you’ll need grazing land, and cowherds to look after them, and someone to watch the cowherds, and any number of other things which will make a pint of milk very dear.” “You’re right, there are too many girls in the green class. Put the four biggest ones in with the yellows.” “No, make all the greens yellow, and all the yellows green. I know that sounds bizarre.” “The dames have no winter skirts. We’ll need four or five hundred by October…They mustn’t be more than four or five inches below the garters. They don’t show. They’re only for keeping warm. If they’re short they’ll stay clean and they’ll last several winters.” “One of the upstairs rooms will have to be separated into two for those two ‘mothers superior’ they’ll never be able to maintain proximity and saintliness.”
But if to some this seemed a frittering away of precious time that might have been otherwise spent, Françoise could not have agreed. She loved all the small tasks of charity, and loved as well the simple fact of being active and unconstrained. By far she preferred this to the false and repetitive commerce of so much of life at court. As she remarked to her secretary on returning from an elegant dinner with ladies and gentlemen of the court, “Now that was a waste of time.”
The King had involved himself with the new school as well, frustrating his architect Mansart with his frequent insistence on changes to its design. Françoise, knowing Louis’s passion for building and well used to his determination to have his own way, had accepted without comment his intrusion into her pet project. “The King is very much occupied with [the building of] Saint-Cyr,” she had written in February 1686. “He has made alterations to the choir and to several other places.” By the spring, with the building almost completed, he had become more concerned with the school’s constitutions. Madame de Brinon had produced a first draft that was subsequently pulled to pieces by the illustrious quartet of Françoise, the King, his confessor Père de la Chaise, and Paul Godet des Marais, later Bishop of Chartres, who was to become an increasingly important figure at the school and in Françoise’s personal life. “We’re working very hard on Saint-Cyr,” she assured Madame de Brinon in April. “Your constitutions have been examined. We’ve cut some of it and added to it and admired it.” Away from centre stage, in Paris, Père Gobelin, appointed religious superior of the school, had been requested to cast his pedantic eye over the document. “Do keep working on the constitutions,” urged Françoise. “You know there are always a thousand grammatical faults in whatever a woman writes,” she conceded, before adding tartly, “but if you don’t mind my saying so, there’s a certain charm in it that’s very rare in men’s writing.” Finally, what was left of Madame de Brinon’s constitutions were turned over to the virtuoso duo of the historiographers-royal, Jean Racine and Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux: “They’re correcting the spelling,” reported Françoise.
In the summer of 1686, the doors of the Maison royale de Saint-Louis at Saint-Cyr were opened to 250 demoiselles, its very first beneficiaries. For each one, documentary evidence had been required of at least four generations of nobility on her father’s side—“We c
an’t include the mothers,” Françoise had admitted to Madame de Brinon. “There are too many mésalliances”—an indication, perhaps, of long-ago passions unconstrained by caste, or perhaps of merchants’ daughters bringing handsome dowries into the families of the poorer aristocracy. Poverty and perfect health were the two remaining requirements: one unhappy girl, arriving on June 10 after a journey of three hundred miles, was sent straight home again for having “something wrong with her eye.”
Those who remained included quite a number from Françoise’s home region of Poitou, every last one, despite her yellowed linen and provincial accent, boasting an irreproachably aristocratic name: ten-year-old Jeanne de Chievres-Salignac from Barbezieux; a trio of young “Valentin” cousins from Rouillac—Marie Valentin de Montbrun, aged fourteen, Marguerite Valentin de Boisauroux, also fourteen, and Philippes-Rose Valentin de Montbrun-Boisauroux, aged just ten. And among all the breton and provençal and languedoc sounds were the clompety accents of two lone little Dutch girls, twelve-year-old Anne-Thérèse Vandam d’Andegnies, and her nine-year-old sister, Marie-Henriette-Léopoldine.
Not all the girls had sisters, of course, nor even cousins. Most of them were alone, and very far from their families. At Saint-Cyr they were treated kindly, and almost certainly better in material terms than they had been at home, but if this was not enough for some of them, Françoise was unsentimental. “Not all mothers are as loving as yours, my dear,” she said in reproach to one homesick little girl. “I myself was never kissed more than twice by my own mother, and then only on the forehead, and after long separations.” In a perverted kind of psychological projection, Françoise’s girls were to be both protected from and subjected to the trials of her own early life: they were to have the material security and sense of noble privilege that she herself had not known, but they were not to have the stable emotional warmth that she had more sorely missed, and whose lack she had never really overcome. It was an inconsistency that was to be revealed in almost all the structures of life at Saint-Cyr, including what she herself would teach the girls.
The Secret Wife of Louis XIV: Françoise d'Aubigné, Madame de Maintenon Page 34