“I shall not regard Esther as completely finished, Madame, until I have received your own opinion of it,” the poet wrote to Françoise. But she was delighted with it; the King—a few little observations notwithstanding—was delighted with it; and above all, the girls were delighted with it. Françoise sent six hundred livres to court composer Jean-Baptiste Moreau, who duly produced “music [to] fit in with the poetry.” In due course, the King’s own musicians arrived with their instruments; tailors arrived with fantastical eastern costumes; carpenters erected a stage in the entrance hall at Saint-Cyr; the parts were assigned among the older “green” and “blue” girls; Racine himself agreed to coach them, and rehearsals began.
Esther was performed for the first time on January 27, 1687, in the presence of the King and personally invited courtiers. “The play is extraordinarily lovely and there’s no stupid gossiping in it…” wrote Liselotte, but if this was mild praise, it was more than enough to initiate a rush of courtly interest in the production, to such an extent, indeed, that further and then extra performances had to be scheduled to accommodate all those who wished to see it. “It was a delightful little divertissement for Madame de Maintenon’s little girls,” observed the pioneering novelist Madame de La Fayette, with a touch of patronization mixed in with her good sense, “but as the price of things always depends on who has made them, or who has commissioned them, Madame de Maintenon’s involvement in this left everyone who saw it in ecstasies: nothing so charming had ever been seen before, the play was better than anything of the kind ever written, the actresses—even playing men—left all the famous ladies of the stage far behind.” “Madame de Maintenon’s involvement,” and the courtiers’ habit of applauding whatever the King applauded, had made Esther a sensation.
Incidentally to most of the fuss, Racine’s poetry was admitted to be good. But although Racine himself was pleased with the play, in one respect he had failed. The successive audiences were quick enough to see the second dimension in the work, but, overlooking his intended Jansenist protest, they saw it instead as a parable of Françoise’s rise, at Athénaïs’s expense: the Persian King’s first wife Vasti (Athénaïs) had been discarded in favour of the reluctant Esther (Françoise), “with this difference,” added Madame de La Fayette, “that Esther was rather younger, and her piety a bit more genuine.”
The production of Esther had achieved far more than even Françoise had intended. “This kind of artistic undertaking should have been very secondary at any girls’ school. Esther showed the King, and the whole court, how unprecedented, how exceptional Saint-Cyr was”—and by inference, how exceptional was Françoise herself. “Madame de Maintenon’s modesty…could not prevent her finding in the character of Esther…certain things flattering to herself,” observed her niece Marthe-Marguerite. “Admire the wisdom, the rare piety, the prudence, the faith of this new Esther!” wrote the eighty-year-old Madeleine de Scudéry, in poetical homage to her former protégée.
“How could anyone resist such praise!” declared Madame de La Fayette, with a shake of her level head.
“I’m happier than I’ve ever been,” said Françoise.
Sixteen
LaVie en Bleu
If Françoise was happier than she had ever been, the same could by no means be said of her friends and relatives in Poitou, nor in any of the other Protestant regions of France. A single religion had been deemed vital for the country’s political stability; no clique of religious sympathizers with France’s Protestant enemies could be tolerated. All French Protestants were to be persuaded, or if necessary forced, to abjure their faith and become Catholic. Thus, and only thus, could absolute loyalty to the King and to France be assured. A peace treaty signed with the Habsburg Emperor in August 1684 had allowed Louis to turn his attention to possible sources of trouble at home, so that the following twelve months had seen the Huguenots deprived of almost all that had remained of their everyday rights and freedoms as his subjects, and within a few months more, they had found themselves at risk of their very lives.
In the terms of the day, discrimination in law, interference in private life, and even sentences of death were viewed without any particular horror. Already in 1681, Louis had been widely praised for issuing a royal declaration allowing Huguenot children of seven years and over to be taken by force from their parents for upbringing as Catholics. But in 1685, with the support of almost all his priests and bishops, including, and most enthusiastically, his Jesuit confessor Père de la Chaise and the dévot preacher Bossuet, the King had initiated a new series of anti-Huguenot declarations of increasing severity. In April 1685, he forbade Huguenot sailors from praying in Protestant fashion while at sea. In June, Huguenot temples were demolished. In July, Huguenots were forbidden to employ Catholics as servants, and Huguenot lawyers prohibited from the practice of the law. In August, Huguenot physicians were prohibited from practising medicine and Huguenot teachers forbidden to teach. In September, Huguenots found practising their religion in secret were ordered to surrender half their property to those who had denounced them. In October, at the château of Fontainebleau, Louis signed an official Revocation of Henri IV’s great Edict of Nantes; it was distributed publicly on the first day of November. In July 1686, a bounty of 1,000 francs was offered to those informing on any Huguenot attempting to leave the country. And from December of that year, anyone found helping Huguenots to leave the country was condemned to death, along with the Huguenots themselves.
This was Louis’s battle, and the battle of the Catholic Church in France, against “the redoubtable monster of heresy.” The “redoubtable monster” was requiring redoubtable means to subdue. The restraints and cruelties of the various royal declarations having proved insufficiently persuasive, Louis had at length agreed to a renewed campaign of dragonnades, the long-term billeting of Catholic soldiers on Huguenot families who refused to convert. The compulsory billeting of troops on local populations was a commonplace at the time, a form of taxation, effectively, to help pay for the country’s periodic military endeavours. Even under the friendliest of circumstances, billeting meant extra expense and inconvenience for the host families, but in this case, where the ultimate purpose was not to spread costs, but to push families towards conversion, the dragoons had received special instructions to make themselves as troublesome as possible within the Huguenot households.
“If the King lives, there won’t be a single Huguenot left twenty years from now.” So Françoise had warned her apparently staunch Huguenot cousin Philippe in the spring of 1681. Now, after only five years, Louis seemed to be achieving his goal. Reports of conversions by the thousands, and by the tens of thousands, were read out weekly at the meetings of his ministers: In Protestant Béarn, in the southwest of the country, “600 people have converted…just from hearing that the army was on its way.” From Françoise’s native Poitou, another Huguenot stronghold, came the report: “We have just read the dispatch from Louvois to intendant Bâville announcing that the Asfeld regiment is arriving. There will be no need here…for any violence in His Majesty’s name”—with the latter sentence subsequently crossed out. “With methods like these,” Fénelon insisted to Bossuet, “one could convert all the Protestants to Islam: we’d only have to show them some dragoons.”
But Fénelon, educationalist extraordinaire and firm friend of Françoise’s dévot circle, belonged to a tiny, barely objecting minority. Louis’s Revocation, and the harsh treatment of Protestants which had preceded it and which followed it now, proved overwhelmingly popular not only within the formal Catholic Church, but throughout the country at large. In Paris, mobs of people took it upon themselves to tear down the great Huguenot temple of Charenton, while the local illuminati looked on, adding their own, better-bred support: “Let the truth reign throughout France!” trumpeted La Fontaine. “Louis must banish this false, suspect, enemy cult from his kingdom!” shouted the moralist La Bruyère, with no hint, for once, of his celebrated satire. Even so moderate a Catholic as Madame d
e Sévigné was in lyrically enthusiastic vein, writing to her far-from-pious cousin, the comte de Bussy-Rabutin, only days after the signing of the Revocation: “You’ll no doubt have seen the King’s edict revoking the Edict of Nantes. There’s nothing so fine as what he says there. No king has ever done nor ever will do anything more memorable…The dragoons have been very good missionaries up to this point; now it’s up to the preachers to complete the work.”
In fact, the dragoons had nothing “very good” about them. Ordinarily, the dragoon was simply a mounted infantryman, who travelled on horseback but fought on foot. His standard weapon was the fire-breathing “dragon,” a short musket whence he drew his own name. The authorities commonly used dragoons against their own population, to quash city riots or smaller-scale seditious rebellions—Cardinal Richelieu and Louis’s minister Colbert had both resorted to them in order to force reluctant peasants to pay their taxes. Lower on the social rung than the true cavalrymen, the dragoons shared the most unsavoury qualities of the poorly raised and often barbarous infantrymen. “The dragoons were mounted roughnecks,” said one commentator succinctly, “to be avoided like the plague,” an assessment confirmed by an eyewitness in these frightening days of the 1680s: “Several people in this town have been beaten up by the soldiers billeted with them,” he reported. “[Other soldiers] raped the women in the presence of their husbands, and tied the children naked onto spits as if to roast them…”
Stories of the dragonnades, relayed by Huguenots who defied the threat of execution and managed to escape France, naturally produced outrage. In England, the diarist John Evelyn, himself smarting from the recent accession of the Catholic King James II in his Protestant land, recorded the following in his private pages:
This day was read in our church…a Brief…for relieving the French Protestants, who came here for protection from the unheard-of cruelties of the King…The French persecution of the Protestants raging with the utmost barbarity, exceeded even what the very heathens used; innumerable persons of the greatest birth and riches leaving all their earthly substance, and hardly escaping with their lives, dispersed through all the countries of Europe. The French tyrant abrogated the Edict of Nantes which had been made in favour of them, and without any cause; on a sudden demolishing all their churches, banishing, imprisoning, and sending to the galleys, all the ministers; plundering the common people; and exposing them to all sorts of barbarous usage by soldiers sent to ruin and prey on them; taking away their children; forcing people to the Mass; and then executing them as relapsers; they burnt their libraries, pillaged their goods, eat up their fields and substance, banished or sent the people to the galleys, and seized on their estates.
And at Versailles itself, one well-concealed Protestant heart was beating with indignation. Not daring to speak out, Liselotte had been reduced to railing about the Revocation in letters to her Aunt Sophie. “They compliment the King in every sermon for his persecution of the poor Huguenots. They think it’s a great and wonderful thing, and anyone who wants to tell him any differently simply isn’t believed,” she wrote, before adding, with a mixture of good sense and jealousy, “It’s really deplorable that no one taught him in his youth what religion is, properly speaking. He didn’t understand that it was instituted to foster unity among men, not to make them torment and persecute one another. But how can anything good result when he allows himself to be governed by ambitious women and designing priests…”
Liselotte’s insinuation, that at least part of the blame lay at Françoise’s feet, was to be adopted, unfairly, by contemporary Protestants, and by later generations in France, as an anti-Maintenon refrain. But there was no truth in it. Indeed, if Françoise was able to sway the King in any way, it would certainly have been towards greater leniency. “Don’t be harsh with the Huguenots,” she had warned her brother Charles, as long before as 1672. “It’s gentleness that draws people. Jesus Christ gave us that example…” Now, in 1687, she was passing on the same advice to her newly converted cousin Philippe, charged with the conversion of further Huguenot cousins. As resisters, they had been imprisoned, which, however, had done nothing to persuade them towards Catholicism. “I admit I’m not very happy, before God or before the King, about delaying these conversions,” she sighed, “…but it’s an infamous thing, to abjure without really being a convinced Catholic. Don’t make your tolerance too obvious, though,” she warned Philippe. “If you do that you’ll be regarded here as a bad Catholic.”
In fact, in her mildly devout heart, Françoise shared the King’s conviction that Huguenots had “no good reason” to deprive themselves of the advantages enjoyed as of right by France’s Catholics. Rarely among her compatriots, she had seen both Protestant life and Catholic life at first hand, and for many years together. In her view, both were equally capable of leading good people to salvation. Early anti-Huguenot measures taken in her home region of Poitou had left plenty of confiscated land, including the old d’Aubigné family estate of Surimeau, going cheaply: she had advised her brother to buy it. Religiously lukewarm, she was a pragmatist to her bones: God would not mind either way, so if the King did mind, it was best to follow the King.
Françoise’s almost indifferent attitude to the Revocation stands in marked contrast to that of her friend Fénelon, who complained that “with methods like these one could convert all the Protestants to Islam.” But Fénelon was out in the field, preaching in the Huguenot regions to those already converted through the terror of the dragonnades. He knew what was really happening, as Françoise, and indeed Louis, apparently did not. The King was kept regularly informed of the enormous numbers of new converts in town after town, but he was told little of the methods used to persuade them. Cynical enough to attribute the mass conversions to a normal human wish to advance in life, unable to empathize with any profound attachment to sectarian principle, it did not occur to him that any great force had been needed to effect the change he had sought. He had been content to leave the matter in the hands of his ministers of cloth and crown, and he was content now to accept the same ministers’ account of it.
As early as 1671, before Françoise had even met the King, he had made up his mind what to do about “the great number of my subjects who are of the so-called reformed religion, an evil which I have always regarded…with great pain. I formed at that point the plan for all my conduct towards them…” At that time, as revealed in his Mémoires written for the young dauphin, Louis had dismissed the idea of converting the Huguenots by force. “It seems to me, my son,” he had continued, “that those who want to use extreme and violent measures do not understand the nature of this evil…It must be allowed to die out very gradually, rather than to flame up again through strong opposition…And the best way of ensuring this is not to oppress them by any new restrictions…but also not to allow them any more new liberties…and to grant no favours at all to any of them…In this way, they will gradually realize, by themselves and without violence, that there is no good reason to deprive themselves of the advantages which my other subjects enjoy.” In Louis’s uncomplicated head, the Huguenots’ religious convictions in themselves were self-evidently “no good reason” for resisting conversion to Catholicism.
The King’s objections to violent measures had not changed markedly since his first anti-Huguenot plan of 1671. The savagery now, and the mild representation of it which Louis himself was receiving, were in fact both the work of the war minister, Louvois.
Louvois’s name was a byword for brutality, and also for cynicism. Though himself Catholic, he had never evinced any particular personal antipathy towards the Huguenots. But the Peace of Nijmegen, at the end of Louis’s Dutch wars in 1678, had left Louvois “floored,” in Saint-Simon’s expression, by the perverse weight of the absence of war. “Monsieur Louvois was afraid that all his wartime influence would dissipate, to the advantage of Monsieur Colbert’s son, Seignelay,” said Françoise’s niece, Marthe-Marguerite, in later years. “Louvois was determined, at any price, to bring the
army into a project that should have been founded on nothing but kindness and gentleness…It was he who asked the King for permission to send the dragoons into the Huguenot regions. He said the Huguenots would only need to see the dragoons, and that would be enough to persuade them to convert…And the King gave in, and in his name they carried out those cruelties that would have been punished if he had known of them. But Monsieur Louvois kept telling him every day how many people had converted, just at the sight of the troops, and the King was naturally so honest that he never imagined anyone could mislead him once he’d given them his confidence.”
Louis had decided to do what his father and grandfather had deemed necessary “for the peace and security of the realm.” “It was a most admirable project, and sensible politically, if you look at it apart from the methods they took to enforce it,” said Marthe-Marguerite. But, naïvely, “never [imagining] anyone could mislead him,” Louis had left the management of his “admirable” project to others, and then, as Liselotte complained, simply refused to believe “anyone who wants to tell him any differently.” “These new converts are about as Catholic as I am Mahometan,” wrote Sébastien Vauban indignantly, but the King simply turned a deaf ear.
In later years, when the truth about Louvois’s brutal dragonnades had been revealed and Louvois himself had died in disgrace, Françoise set down her reflections on the matter of the Huguenot conversions, in response to an apparently private mémoire which Vauban, a man of keen moral and political interests as well as a great military engineer, had sent for her personal consideration:
The Secret Wife of Louis XIV: Françoise d'Aubigné, Madame de Maintenon Page 36