But above all, Françoise wanted to prove to herself, and no doubt to Fénelon as well, that at least in some sense she had kept the faith. The new Archbishop was the son of an old friend from the Marais, and, crucially, had himself been close to Fénelon since their student days together at the Sorbonne. Scion of an ancient noble family, he was a man of sincere and practical piety, though far from equal to his friend in intellectual terms. The King, who had never met Noailles, had appointed him purely on Françoise’s recommendation. He had been a model pastor as bishop of Châlons, and Louis had concluded, trustingly, that he would very likely be the same as archbishop of Paris. With the adventure of “pure love” at Saint-Cyr an apparently certain secret, and now with the capture of Noailles, Françoise felt doubly, and prematurely, secure. But four months later, towards the end of 1695, she was jolted out of her composure by the sudden reappearance of Jeanne Guyon herself: far from taking the healthful waters at the Bourbon spa, since her trial in July she had been all the time in Paris, in hiding.
Madame Guyon was promptly arrested and escorted to the fortress of Vincennes for interrogation by the chief of police, Nicolas de La Reynie, happy to flex his investigatory muscles once again after the long period of relative calm which had followed the end of the Poisons Affair. The King, though not much interested in Madame Guyon, asked Père de la Chaise nonetheless to explain the matter to him. Père de la Chaise proceeded to explain not only Madame Guyon’s personal form of “quietism,” but also its popularity among certain prominent people at court, and its links—invented for the occasion—to certain political views which might be construed as seditious. Fénelon, as His Majesty knew, was a keen supporter of Madame Guyon, and an outspoken critic of certain of His Majesty’s policies, including the forced conversion of Huguenots and the recent elevation of His Majesty’s two legitimized sons, the ducs du Maine and Toulouse, to the status of princes of the blood. The ducs de Beauvillier and Chevreuse were also followers of Madame Guyon. Both held prominent posts; both had opposed the King’s destruction of the Palatinate; both, though Père de la Chaise did not mention this, were his own enemies, seeking to create a more pious court, with a King less bent on warfare. And both, along with their wives, were members of Françoise’s closest circle, and if the confessor did not mention this, it was because he did not need to.
Louis did not panic, and for the moment took no action: Beauvillier and Chevreuse were among his most trusted advisors, and his wife, undeclared or otherwise, was surely above suspicion. But he had been alerted. Jeanne Guyon, whom La Reynie had judged to pose no immediate threat to the state, was transferred from Vincennes to the less forbidding Bastille, while Bossuet and Fénelon, like two dogs fighting over a bone, refused to let the theological matter lie. “I would rather die than present so scandalous a scene to the public as to contradict Monsieur Bossuet,” the latter insisted to Françoise, before proceeding to do exactly that, by publishing his opinions—“and to very bad effect,” as she subsequently observed to Noailles. Bossuet, outraged by the impertinence of his brilliant former pupil, responded, unattractively, by publishing a series of personal and supposedly confidential notes which Fénelon had written him.
“The quietism affair is making more of a noise than I thought it would,” Françoise recorded in the autumn of 1696. “A lot of people at court are quite alarmed about it.” She herself, naturally, was among them, and her best protection lay, she felt, in persuading Fénelon to retract his support for Madame Guyon once and for all. But whether through principle or pride or longer-term ambition, he proved immoveable, as Françoise relayed to Noailles after Fénelon’s parting visit in October 1696. “I have seen our friend,” she wrote. “We had quite an argument, but very calmly. I wish I were so faithful and so attached to my duties as he is to his friend. He won’t let go of her, and nothing will change his mind.” Fénelon himself apparently felt there was nothing to be lost by nailing his colours to both masts: intransigent in his loyalty to Madame Guyon, or to her ideas, he nonetheless did his best to retain Françoise’s support in a series of plaintive letters: “Why do you close your heart to us?” he wrote to her. “God knows how much I suffer in causing suffering to the person in the world for whom I have the most constant and sincere respect and attachment.”
He continued to do so, all the same. In mid-1696, Bossuet had thrown down a final gauntlet in his new, as yet unpublished Instructions on the States of Prayer, to which, as he declared publicly, Fénelon would append his own signature of agreement. Fénelon picked up the gauntlet and sent it back to Bossuet unexamined. In January 1697 he thrust a gauntlet of his own at Bossuet’s feet: a newly written, very Guyoniste, very quietist document entitled An Explanation of the Maxims of the Saints on the Interior Life—the “explanation” a little extra knock on Bossuet’s large yet evidently uncomprehending theological head. In March, Bossuet published his Instructions, taking malicious care to present it to the King along with Fénelon’s Explanation and, no doubt, an explanation of his own as to why he was right and Fénelon wrong.
For Louis, it was enough to know that Fénelon had been propounding unorthodox ideas. “If he’s right,” said one of Bossuet’s shocked prelate friends, “we’ll have to burn the whole of the New Testament and declare that Jesus Christ came into the world for the sole purpose of leading us astray.” Even more importantly, as far as the King was concerned, was the threat posed by unorthodox religion to the state: like Jansenism, like Huguenotism, quietism was an encouragement to sedition. Fénelon was tutor to the King’s own grandsons, among them the future King of France. And he was an archbishop. And he had been working closely at Saint-Cyr with—Madame de Maintenon.
“The King is watching me with suspicion,” wrote a frightened Françoise to Noailles. “It isn’t my fault, though I know I’ll be blamed, all the same. The King hates anything unorthodox. I think God must want to humble Fénelon—he has gone too far along his own path…I was completely wrong in thinking he wouldn’t write anything reprehensible,” she continued, not quite convincingly. “…You can be certain that this affair is not going away, not in Rome, not in France, and not in the King’s heart, and speaking of the King, he is concerned about the effect on the young princes. I am distressed and embarrassed about it, for the Church’s sake, for your sake, for my own sake. I’m afraid of what might happen if these two great luminaries draw things out to the bitter end. I’m afraid of what the King will do, and how he will answer for it to God.”
In April 1697 Fénelon was instructed to submit his Explanation to Rome. “If he is condemned,” Françoise wrote to Noailles, “it will be a stigmatization that he won’t recover from easily, but if he isn’t, he’ll be a considerable protector for quietism.” In mid-June, Fénelon was summoned to the King. “I have conducted an interview with the finest and most fantastical mind in my kingdom,” Louis recorded. Evidently concluding that Fénelon, though quixotic, was essentially harmless, he sent him off to his archbishopric in Cambrai in northwestern France, without, however, removing him from the post of tutor to the young ducs. From Cambrai, Fénelon continued to write and publish further Guyoniste tomes, despite an official condemnation of his Explanation: though the examining prelates had in fact rather liked it, the Pope himself, attempting to curry favour with Louis, had insisted that it be condemned. “In France, anyway, no one cares what anyone thinks,” Liselotte observed to her earnest Lutheran relatives. “Provided you don’t publish anything, and you go to mass regularly and make your normal devotions, and you don’t align yourself with any political group, you can think what you like, no one cares.”
At Versailles, the victorious and unstoppable Bossuet carried on with his execrations of quietism, and Louis, shaken by the continuing denunciations, began to think again about its political ramifications. “The King is getting angry all over again about what we allowed Fénelon to do,” wrote Françoise to Noailles. “He reproaches me greatly for it all…I’ve never seen him so stern, so defiant, so impenetrable. If I l
oved him less, I think he would have sent me away long ago. I’ve never been so close to disgrace,” she continued, with the unsettling implication that it was her own devotion to Louis, and not his love for her, that had so far kept her safe.
“The old hag isn’t the happiest woman in the world,” noted Liselotte. “She cries all the time and talks about dying. But I think it’s all just to see what people will say about it.” It was not. Françoise was indeed very close to disgrace. Following the publication of yet another weighty tome of Bossuet’s, Louis had actually mentioned that he might make her a duchesse, as he had made Louise de la Vallière, in her frigid convent, and Angélique de Fontanges, in her grave. Her flirtation with an improbably easy road to salvation, and her personal infatuation with Fénelon, had perversely metamorphosed into a seditious attempt to undermine the stability of the realm—not that Louis thought her guilty of anything so grave, but his confidence in her good sense, in her reliability, and in her honesty with him had been badly shaken. Throughout the summer of 1698, days on end would pass without his addressing a single word to her. She took to sleeping overnight at Saint-Cyr; when at Versailles, she would hide herself away, until the courtiers began to whisper that Madame de Maintenon was dying of cancer. “Pray for me,” she wrote to Noailles, “but not for my health—for what I really need.” Françoise’s tears were genuine, and her talk of death, at the age of sixty-two, an ashamed and fearful wish for escape.
With Fénelon banished and Bossuet still ranting, it was steady, unspectacular Père Godet des Marais who thought of her now. Early in the autumn of 1698 he took it upon himself to write to the King, reminding him of Françoise’s “tenderness and loyalty” towards him, and of her constant concern for his reputation among “all the self-serving and hypocritical” crowds at court. The letter did its work. Françoise may have been naïve and foolish; she may have involved herself with undesirable people—perhaps even, as Père de la Chaise had insinuated, with ambitious people who sought to manipulate her for their own ends—but Louis knew her too well to doubt that she had ever wished him anything but well.
“So, Madame,” he said to her many sad evenings later, “are we going to see you die over this affair?” He had forgiven her, and just possibly, he had called himself to account as well, for maintaining her in an impossible position as his wife and yet not his queen. With formal status, acknowledged as his royal consort, with public duties of her own and unquestioned precedence at court, she might have had no need to cast about for influence, involving herself behind his back with dubious people and potentially dangerous ideas. But he had kept his proud and capable wife on a golden leash, and after fifteen years of humiliating duplicity, “Her Steadiness” had stumbled at last.
The duc de Bourgogne was sixteen years old, and in his honour Louis had commanded a vast series of military exercises at the camp of Compiègne, to the north of Paris. It took place in the middle of September 1698, a few days after the King’s reconciliation with Françoise, and the two drove up, in separate carriages, to join the 60,000 soldiers and hundreds of courtiers and foreign diplomats assembled to pay homage to the young heir-but-one to the Bourbon throne. “There were so many men,” wrote the duc de Saint-Simon, “that for the first time at Compiègne, the ducs had to share rooms.” There was a great to-do among the ambassadors, since not all had been accorded the vital word “for” on the doors of their rooms. “No one knows how this for distinction came about,” continued Saint-Simon, “and really it’s idiotic. It just means that you have for So-and-so chalked on the door of your room, instead of just So-and-so. Princes of the blood, cardinals, and foreign princes all get a for, and some ducs and duchesses have got them, but it doesn’t mean your room will be any better than anyone else’s, and that’s why I think it’s idiotic…” concluded the duc, himself notoriously niggly about protocol, and incidentally for-less. The magnificence of the military exercises themselves knew no bounds, as he went on to explain:
The King wanted to display all the images of war, so there was a siege, with lines, trenches, artillery, bridgeworks and so on…and an assault on an old rampart…and then on the plain beyond that were all the troops in formation…It was the most marvellous thing to see, this game of attack and defence, and since it wasn’t serious, no one had to worry about anything except the precision of all the movements.
But there was a spectacle of quite another sort which the King showed to everyone, to all his army and all this vast crowd of people from every country, and I’ll be able to depict that spectacle in forty years’ time as well as I can today, it struck me so forcibly. Madame de Maintenon was seated, facing the plain, in a litter chair with three window-panes…The King was standing to the right of her chair, and every second moment he would bend down to explain to Madame de Maintenon what was going on in the exercises. Each time, she would lower her window four or five fingerlengths…The King spoke to no one but her, other than to give out orders…Everyone was astonished and embarrassed and pretending not to notice, but they were watching this more attentively than anything the army was doing…The King put his hat on top of Madame de Maintenon’s litter chair…
When Madame de Maintenon left, the King left less than a quarter of an hour later…Everyone was saying they could hardly believe what they’d seen, and even the soldiers who’d been on the plain were asking who it was that the King had kept leaning down to speak to…You can imagine the effect it made on the foreigners there. Soon they were talking about it all over Europe…
In terms of the baroque protocol of Louis’s court, the fact that the King had spoken to no one but Françoise throughout the entire display—and above all, his “bending down” repeatedly to do so—could indicate only one thing: she was, de facto if not de jure, the Queen. There would be no announcement, no formal recognition, as was to be confirmed once and for all at a meeting of the High Council in October 1698, but the matter, from now on, could be regarded as an open secret. “They won’t say whether she’s the Queen or not,” wrote Liselotte grumpily, “but she gets a queen’s privileges, anyway.”
Françoise, pulled back from the brink of disgrace, found her position paradoxically stronger than ever before. Louis had evidently been giving some thought to her previous exclusion from public affairs. It had caused mischief and might have proved genuinely dangerous, but her loyalty to him could not be in doubt, and there may even have been a trace of sympathy in his voice as he bent down to speak to her through the “four or five fingerlengths” of her window.
Whatever the case, from this point, at the King’s invitation, Françoise was present at every meeting of his High Council. If formally she was to remain outside the royal circle, in practice her influence from now on was only to grow. Louis, now over sixty, wanted support and reassurance beyond the self-interested politicking inevitable at court among great and small. Increasingly, he came to rely on Françoise for advice—always presented with an exceeding, and very tactical, discretion. Once again, her protégés prospered: it was Françoise who chose the billiard-loving parlementary counsellor, Michel Chamillart, for the great Colbert’s post of Comptroller-General of the nation’s finances, and in the same year of 1699, she achieved for Archbishop de Noailles the coveted little red circle of a cardinal’s hat.
In the autumn of 1697, with the signing of a series of treaties in the Dutch town of Rijswijk, Louis’s war against William’s Grand Alliance had at last come to an end. After nine years of fighting, no one had gained much. Hard-won territories were handed back; old and new regimes were grudgingly recognized. A time of peace had begun in Europe, but a wary, shaky peace, threatened by dislike and distrust and unsatisfied ambitions. Louis had been largely to blame with his Rhineland attack of 1688, and if he accepted peace for the moment, he had already begun to think of his next expansionist campaign.
There had been other endings and beginnings, too, during the years of the 1690s. After almost a decade of neglect and humiliation, Athénaïs had finally agreed to leave Versailles
, on condition that it could be made to look as though she had done so voluntarily. No other lover had enlivened the days of her long decline at court. A healthy measure of vanity, and perhaps a residue of genuine love, had prevented her from seeking solace with any other man; indeed, had she done so, abandoning the game of protecting Françoise’s reputation, Louis would almost certainly have dismissed her at once.
Athénaïs left Versailles with a pension of 240,000 livres per year in her pocket. The duc du Maine, ungallantly keen to take over his mother’s apartment, began throwing her furniture out of the windows before she had even driven away—to begin sixteen years of penitence, apparently sincere, at the convent of Saint Joseph in Paris.
After years of ill health and unhappiness, the dauphine was dead. She had exceeded her dynastic duty in providing the dauphin with three healthy sons, and having spent most of her life at court in the seclusion of her sickroom, she was hardly missed at all.
The Secret Wife of Louis XIV: Françoise d'Aubigné, Madame de Maintenon Page 42