The King’s weakness, however, was not a weakness of mind, as the forgetful Saint-Simon himself had very recently recorded. Seeing quite clearly through the wiles of his confessor, Père Tellier, for instance, Louis had refused to be persuaded into making any last-minute clerical appointments, “that’s to say, to leave them in Père Tellier’s own gift…The worse the King became, the more Père Tellier pressed him…but he didn’t succeed. The King said he had enough to do making his accounts with God, and told him to stop it once and for all…” Louis had remained in possession of his faculties to the last. Neither Françoise nor Mignon nor Villeroy could have persuaded him on his deathbed, any more than they had ever been able to persuade him during his active life, to do anything that was against his own inclination.
All the same, the will had been changed. Only hours after Louis’s death, his nephew, the duc d’Orléans, Regent of an absolutist state, with no legal restraint whatsoever on his power, found that in the codicil, his legitimized cousins, du Maine and Toulouse, together with others of their supporters, had been named members of the Regency Council. Orléans wasted no time in having the late King’s will overturned. The very next day, he convoked a lit de justice, an exceptional session of the Paris parlement with the little King in formal attendance, and there ensured the disallowing of the troublesome codicil. Mignon and his brother scarcely minded, neither being of a strongly political disposition, as Orléans evidently realized: having proved his point and ensured his control of the regency, he at once appointed Mignon superintendent of the little King’s education, with his friends Villeroy and Bishop André-Hercule de Fleury, both former protégés of Françoise, the boy’s governor and tutor respectively.
If Orléans was satisfied, the duc de Saint-Simon was not. In his view, present control of the little King’s education implied future power in the land: influence in the framing of policy and the choosing of ministers. The regency would last only until the King attained his formal majority in 1723, at the age of thirteen, still too young by far to have escaped the thrall of his childhood governors. Ministers would be appointed, powerful and lucrative posts would be assigned, and Saint-Simon himself, a long-standing enemy of both Mignon and Villeroy, would be left, he feared, empty-handed.
With this prospect before him, the ambitious forty-year-old Saint-Simon set to undermining Mignon in the eyes of his cousin, the Regent. Orléans himself, with a mixture of his father’s wild flair and his mother’s down-to-earth common sense, had begun his regency with a series of practical reforms and a relaxing of the stiff formal protocols of his uncle’s day. He had abandoned Versailles for the Palais-Royal in Paris, bringing government back to the capital, and in the process rejuvenating both city and court: in place of Louis’s tediously ceremonious petit lever, his official waking-up each morning, courtiers now sought l’admission au chocolat—the right to attend the Regent as he sat up in bed, sipping an early cup of hot chocolate. But though intelligent, farsighted, and widely popular, Orléans was enjoying no great success as Regent. After only two years, his liberalization of the Paris parlement, permitting the parlementaires to raise objections to his own decrees, had, unsurprisingly, begun to turn to his disadvantage; his bold economic reforms were foundering, and the difficulties of repaying the late King’s vast debts seemed insurmountable. He fell into a great lethargy, from which Saint-Simon spent months attempting to rouse him, with Liselotte complaining to her half-sister that “if my son’s mistresses really loved him, they’d be taking better care of him, but these Frenchwomen, they don’t care about anything but themselves and their own pleasures…”
In the late summer of 1718, Saint-Simon finally achieved his goal of removing Mignon from power. Though he had half-persuaded Orléans, the Regent remained “irresolute,” so that Saint-Simon was obliged to join forces in the venture with Orléans’s cousin, the prince de Condé, himself, unlike the upstart Mignon, an unquestionably legitimate prince of the blood, and evidently happy to overlook all family liabilities which might attend his action: his own wife, Louise-Françoise, the former Mademoiselle de Nantes, was Mignon’s sister “Chubby,” and his sister, Louise-Bénédicte, was the duchesse du Maine, Mignon’s wife.
Saint-Simon, informed by a helpful valet of his best chance of capturing Condé’s undivided attention, turned up at the prince’s residence in Paris just as he was getting out of bed. The prince dressed quickly, and the two sat down together “in armchairs of equal size” to plot in egalitarian comfort. “I asked him how he intended to strike at the duc du Maine,” said Saint-Simon, “and he told me, by removing him from the King’s education.” Saint-Simon concurred, adding, improbably but self-justifyingly, that “such a blow to the duc du Maine now” would be “the surest way of avoiding civil war in the future.”
The blow was struck on August 26, and indeed succeeded beyond Saint-Simon’s fondest hopes. By the Regent’s decree at a specially convened lit de justice, Mignon not only lost “the education” of eight-year-old Louis, but he and his brother, the comte de Toulouse, lost their always controversial status as princes of the blood, and with this, their right to inherit the throne. Toulouse, the younger brother and evidently regarded as less of a potential threat than Mignon, was permitted to retain the honours of his former rank in terms of hats, bows, and the ever vital armchairs, but for Mignon it was a reduction to the ranks of an ordinary peer.
He accepted the demotion mildly, though the same could by no means be said of his diminutive but superebullient wife, Louise-Bénédicte. Granddaughter of le Grand Condé and, like most of her family, a constitutional troublemaker, Louise-Bénédicte, “no taller than a ten-year-old,” was popularly known as “Madame Gunpowder.” Declaring that “she would set the whole kingdom ablaze to keep du Maine’s right to the throne,” she stormed into Orléans’s rooms and abused him “very loudly indeed…which her timid husband hadn’t dared to do himself.”
As for Saint-Simon, it is a wonder he survived hearing the news: “I was dying of joy. I really feared I was going to faint. My heart was beating madly; it was bursting out of my chest, but I couldn’t stop listening, it was such delicious torment…I had triumphed over the bastards, I had revenge at last, I was swimming in my revenge, overjoyed by the final accomplishment of the most violent and constant desires of my life…”
As required by the 1714 Treaty of Utrecht, which had concluded the long War of the Spanish Succession, Louis had renounced the right of his grandson, the King of Spain, to succeed to the French crown. In Madrid, Felipe himself had renounced any pretensions of his own to France’s throne. Even at the time, peers and counsellors had questioned the legality of this step under French law. Now, less than four years later, the cynicism, or treachery, that Louis had instilled in his heirs was to drag Bourbon France once again into war—this time, perversely, with Bourbon Spain.
Louis XV was still only eight years old and his health was by no means robust; in the perilous, disease-ridden eighteenth century, there was no guarantee that he would survive to adulthood. His brothers were both dead, his father and Uncle Berry as well. Now that the bastards du Maine and Toulouse had been struck from the line of succession, in case of the little King’s death the throne would pass to the Regent, Orléans. But in Madrid, the French-born Felipe had three living sons already, and a second wife, the German-Spanish Elizabeth Farnese, who was still only twenty-six years of age. He and his sons were the direct descendants of Louis XIV, with a far better claim to his throne—if the Utrecht treaties were disregarded—than the Regent, merely the late King’s nephew. Encouraged by his hugely ambitious First Minister, Cardinal Alberoni, Felipe decided to seek the regency for himself, so that in the event of little Louis’s death, he or one of his sons might take the throne of France.
Over the course of 1718, the plans were laid: Orléans was to be captured during one of his many journeys outside Paris, Felipe was to be declared the new Regent, and the whole coup was to be sustained by a landing of Spanish forces in the west of France.
Within the country itself, the Spanish ambassador Cellamare was to lead the conspiracy, assisted by various disaffected French nobles resentful of their own exclusion from power, with Mignon’s wife, Louise-Bénédicte, “Madame Gunpowder,” prominent among them.
Abetting her in this treasonous exercise were a halfhearted Mignon and his sister Françoise-Marie, duchesse d’Orléans—the wife, no less, of the Regent himself: twenty-six years and eight children after the marriage which had so upset her, Liselotte once again was to have cause for outrage. Françoise-Marie’s motive appeared to be simple hatred of her husband, admittedly a man of flagrant infidelities. In her younger days, together with her sister “Chubby,” she had caused endless scandal at court with her wild behaviour, which included sitting up half the night with unsuitable friends, smoking and getting drunk. But now at forty, Françoise-Marie was scarcely to be seen moving from her sofa. “Her laziness is beyond belief,” wrote mother-in-law Liselotte. “She’s had a chaise longue made especially to lie on when she’s playing cards. She gambles on it, eats on it, reads on it…She’s just had the colic again from having eaten too much; that woman can eat the most enormous quantities of food—she gets that from her father and mother. Her daughters are exactly the same; they eat until they make themselves sick, and then they start eating again. It’s disgusting…”
Françoise-Marie had in any case moved, or been moved, sufficiently to take some part in Cellamare’s plot, which gathered in pace towards the autumn of 1718. The duc de Saint-Simon “persuaded” himself, by his own admission, that from her cloister at Saint-Cyr, Françoise was involved as well: “It doesn’t take too much to persuade oneself that she knew all about what her Mignon was up to, all his plans,” he later wrote. “The hope of his success had been sustaining her…”
But by the beginning of December there were clear indications that all had been discovered, and at the end of the month Mignon and Louise-Bénédicte were arrested, along with 1,500 co-conspirators scattered throughout the provinces. At Saint-Cyr, Françoise heard only vaguely of the arrests. “She knew something had happened, but she didn’t know what,” said Mademoiselle d’Aumale, “so she sent out for more information…When she learned the news, she was really grief-stricken.”
The Regent repaid his treacherous family with more generosity than they had deserved. Escaping a possible sentence of death, Louise-Bénédicte, though one of the principal plotters, was exiled to the province of Burgundy. Françoise-Marie went unpunished apart from a baptism of slander: thenceforth her husband was to refer to her only as “Madame Lucifer.” The reluctant conspirator Mignon was imprisoned in the grim northern fortress of Doullens, in the Somme. His disgrace left Françoise “dreadfully afflicted”—“It was Death’s first strike at her,” said Saint-Simon. She was never to see Mignon again.
Louise-Bénédicte eventually returned to her château of Sceaux to a brilliant salonnière life, with the young Voltaire one of her most frequent and adoring guests. On Mignon’s release from prison in 1720, he took up a gentlemanly existence in the country, and for the rest of his days lived quietly, apolitically, and determinedly far from his wife.
The following year, the duc de Saint-Simon was appointed France’s ambassador to the court in Madrid. There he contracted smallpox, which he survived, counting himself well compensated by his subsequent promotion to the rank of Grandee of Spain.
D’Orléans died in 1723, shortly after the young King reached his majority. Liselotte’s son had proved a good regent for his cousin, if not wholly for France. But over the first twenty years of Louis XV’s personal reign, things improved considerably, largely owing to the intelligent direction of André-Hercule de Fleury, now a cardinal and, in the time-honoured tradition of éminences rouges, prime minister of France. Fleury had been first set on the road to prominence by Françoise, a fact which Saint-Simon, returning from Spain to seek accommodation with the new regime, swiftly took care to forget.
Of all the political upheavals which beset the early days of the regency, Françoise saw nothing. Since her arrival at Saint-Cyr on the day of Louis’s death, she had not left it, nor was she ever to do so. “She’d had the good sense to declare herself dead to the world,” declared the duc de Saint-Simon, ungenerously. Though she had never been on good terms with the duc d’Orléans, as Regent of France he had treated her kindly, maintaining her annual pension of 48,000 livres and assuring her of his personal attention should she ever be in further need. But Françoise was almost eighty years old. There was little left for her now, as she said, but “to think of my salvation and to do good works.”
She dismissed her household of servants, enumerated by Mademoiselle d’Aumale as follows: one stable manager, three household valets, one maître d’hôtel, one functionary, one assistant functionary, one cook, one assistant cook, one coachman, one postillion, one groom, three lackeys, one porter, two litter-bearers, two or three chambermaids, one serving-woman, and one kitchen-boy. Of the entire retinue she retained only two maids “for inside the house” and a valet “for outside.” To Marthe-Marguerite in Paris, she sent instructions to sell her carriage, with an afterword reminding her that it was “very well made, the seats well stuffed, the windows of beautiful glass, very comfortable, and the damask good for another four or five years”—all prompted by the reflection that her niece was likely to let it go too cheaply, since “you don’t have the right look for haggling.”
Françoise had no wish, and no need, to raise money now for her own expenses. They were minimal, and indeed declining. Her two private rooms at Saint-Cyr were enough for her own use; all her visitors were received there, or if the weather was fine, they would stroll about together in the gardens. Once at Saint-Cyr, in fact, she became ever more concerned—almost obsessed, in fact—with giving things away. Everything spare was put to immediate use, not only money and every kind of clothing, but bread, meat, and salt; wine and sugar for the sick; sheets and blankets and layettes for babies. These days, however, she did not go about the town distributing things herself, but remained at Saint-Cyr, soliciting alms from those of her visitors who had something to spare, and passing them on to those who had not.
Her own clothes and more decorative personal items were swiftly turned into alms as well. Abandoning her colourful court gowns, she took to wearing “very simple, not to say rough” black dresses with plain linen—to such an extent, in fact, that by the summer of 1717 her maids were having to press her to buy herself a few new blouses. “They tell me I’m almost out of them,” she wrote to Marthe-Marguerite, “but I don’t feel like buying things at the moment. Could you have half a dozen made for me? The fabric doesn’t have to be anything very fine.”
Though eighty years old, she had still been using perfumes and lotions for her hands and her hair. These she now relinquished, saying, “The man I used these things for is gone.” At table, armed with a single napkin—“Isn’t that all I need?”—she ate one dish only, and though she had been accustomed to taking a cup of hot chocolate every evening, she now gave this up, “not wishing to introduce any delicacies into Saint-Cyr.” Her table linen, “floral muslin, the most beautiful I’d ever seen,” she gave away, “and she returned to me [Mademoiselle d’Aumale] a basket which I’d given her for emptying her pockets into at the end of the day. It’s too pretty for me now, she said.”
Most of Françoise’s royal pension of 48,000 livres was spoken for each year by the many schools and workshops she supported. The rest was spent, almost to the last penny, on casual charity as the need arose. She barely regarded it as charity at all: “God will have to be very good indeed to reward us for this,” she said, “since as far as I’m concerned, it already gives me more pleasure to do it than I deserve.” Memories of her hard early days were no doubt always with her, along with a strong consequent empathy for the poor, but she may have felt as well a touch of guilt at even the modest comfort of her own present life. She was apparently much taken by the parable of Dives and Lazarus, noting that it was not f
or any crime that Dives was to be punished in the next world, but rather for the life of ease that he had lived on earth while the poor at his gate went hungry. If in her younger life she had played the role of Lazarus, she was anxious not to play Dives now in the years remaining to her.
Closeted with the demoiselles and nuns at Saint-Cyr, divested of all worldly goods and cares, Françoise, in her eighties, had imagined she would simply fade away, without any fuss, into the next world. “I have found the pleasantest retreat that I could desire,” she had written to Madame des Ursins a few days after her arrival. “My life will be short now. I have nothing to complain of…” But the lure of company and correspondence proved too great, and besides, the present world kept breaking in. In the two years before his arrest, Mignon had been a regular visitor, as the duc de Saint-Simon reported, informed by one of the former demoiselles—“who was always fond of la Maintenon, although she’d given her nothing…And her ‘Mignon’ was always welcomed with open arms, although he really stank”—only in the duc’s nostrils, however.
Charles’s daughter, Françoise-Charlotte-Amable, now duchesse de Noailles, came often with her husband, the duc, himself a close friend of Françoise’s; she had given the pair her château of Maintenon, with its unfinished aqueduct already decaying into ivy-clad romantic ruin. There were clergy, of course, including “several obscure and fanatical bishops,” as Saint-Simon described them, and, one evening every week, Mary of Modena, impoverished widow of the former King James II of England. The quondam Queen, still a beauty at almost sixty, would set out from the dreary retreat of her convent at Chaillot “in an extraordinary equipage, a coach and six emblazoned with a splendid but darkening coat-of-arms, with a drunken-looking crown inclining on the top of its dome-shaped roof.” Thirty years before, “it had been the height of elegance; now it was a source of embarrassment.” Mary would spend the evening dining and chatting with Françoise, nibbling on sweets and pastries provided by an admiring clergyman, and both equally seated, to Saint-Simon’s indignation, in a proper chair with a back and arms.
The Secret Wife of Louis XIV: Françoise d'Aubigné, Madame de Maintenon Page 48