All We Know: Three Lives

by Lisa Cohen

  Esther focused first, as these lines from La Beaumelle suggest, on Maintenon’s reputation. The eighteenth-century memoirist the Duc de Saint-Simon called her “‘the famous and fatal Madame de Maintenon,’” she wrote, “and…pursues [her] with peculiar malevolence.” She summarized the general low opinion of her subject by citing the writer Émile Henriot (her own contemporary): “Madame de Maintenon n’a pas bon[ne] presse.” (Madame de Maintenon gets a bad rap.) She also focused on Maintenon’s eventful, difficult childhood and on the extravagant reverses and advances of her life:

  Françoise d’Aubigné, Madame Scarron and Madame de Maintenon, to give her the three names she bore during the course of her life, had been formed by an experience that was both harsh and wide and by a strange inheritance. The improbable fate that was reserved for her and that brought her at last, after so many vicissitudes and such a prolonged acquaintance with poverty, disaster and disgrace, to what she called “A Fortune that it is hard to imagine”; contained some of the most extravagant elements of melodrama…The second wife of Le Roi Soleil was born in a prison—the fortress of Niort—where her father was incarcerated and where her mother had been allowed to join him.

  Maintenon’s prehistory—her Huguenot forebears, the religious wars of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century France, and the relationship of both to the dance of power during the reign of Louis XIV and before—is another thread of Esther’s narrative. This was the bloody, irrational tale that fascinated her as much as Maintenon herself did: the traumas of “a century that was almost as sinister as our own.” In 1534, shortly after Jean Calvin fled France for Geneva, a third of the French population were Huguenots, and “there seemed to be nothing that could stop the progress of Calvinism in France.” The Catholic attempt “to exterminate the Huguenots,” Esther wrote, turned into “a civil war of unparalleled ferocity, that was to divide, devastate and exhaust France for thirty-six years; to leave after it a fatal legacy of malice and hatred; and to prepare the way for the absolute monarchy.”

  Françoise d’Aubigné’s great-grandfather, Jean d’Aubigné, was one of those converts to Protestantism. Her grandfather, Théodore-Agrippa d’Aubigné, was a famous Huguenot soldier, poet, and scholar, a leader during those civil wars. But her mother was a devout Catholic, and Françoise was manipulated throughout her childhood to fight small versions of the battles between the Catholic Church and French Protestants. Her father, Constant d’Aubigné, was a gambler, rapist, murderer, forger, and counterfeiter who “changed his religion whenever he thought it expedient to do so”; betrayed his father to the French government; “was sentenced to death three times”; spent much of his life in prison; and deserted his second wife, Jeanne de Cardillhac, the daughter of one of his jailors, when he was released from prison. Jeanne had Françoise baptized a Catholic, but the child was soon adopted by her Huguenot aunt Madame de Villette, because of her parents’ desperate circumstances. Growing up with this woman, Françoise “became a fervent protestant—a fact,” Esther wrote, “that some of her Catholic biographers have attempted to deny.” However, “extremely precocious, she showed great theological independence and she refused to subscribe to the doctrine of eternal punishment, the cornerstone of Calvinism. ‘You will see that God will change his mind, and that he will put out the flames of hell’: she said when she [was] seven years old.”

  After then living with her mother for several unhappy years—including a time on the Caribbean island of Marie Galante—Françoise was adopted by a distant relation, Madame de Neuillant, who treated her as an unpaid servant and attempted to restore her to Catholicism. Madame de Neuillant’s crusade was motivated by her desire to find favor with the monarchy and was part of the uneasy pre-Revolutionary negotiations between the aristocracy and the Crown. But “exposed to all the winds of doctrine,” Françoise still refused to renounce her faith, so Madame de Neuillant sent her to an Ursuline convent, hoping that the nuns would be more persuasive. There, wrote Esther, the girl

  conceived a passionate attachment to one of the nuns, a certain Mother Celeste. That it was far more than a passing infatuation is shown by the way in which she spoke of it many years afterwards…“My dear Mother Celeste, I loved her to a point that I can never express. I thought that I would die when I had to leave that convent…” It was the most emotional confession that she ever made and it revealed a side of her nature that was deeply hidden…But in spite of her affection for Mother Celeste she remained implacably hostile to the Catholic religion.

  By the time Madame de Neuillant sent her to another convent, this time in Paris, her case had become notorious: She was the granddaughter of the Huguenot hero Agrippa d’Aubigné and “was not an ordinary girl of fourteen,” Esther wrote. “She had intellectual powers of a very uncommon kind and a will of iron.” At this convent she met another special nun—humane, intelligent, and

  so persuasive that Françoise d’Aubigné asked that a catholic priest and a protestant minister should debate before her and that she should make her own decision on the merits of the two creeds…The debate continued for several days and throughout it Françoise d’Aubigné stood in the parlour of the convent wearing a shabby dress that was much too short for her and holding a bible in her hand, in which she followed the texts which the priest and the minister were quoting with the closest attention…“Finally she perceived that the minister was garbling certain passages of the bible and…she determined to embrace the Catholic cause and made her abjuration:” we are told.

  She based her decision, it seems, on the principle of correct citation. Noting her subject’s later silence about the event and the few other sources on it, Esther asked, “Did she grow weary of the unequal struggle and decide at last that God was on the side of the heaviest battalions and that it was better to be a Catholic than a protestant in France? Did she realize that the French reformation was one of the greatest failures in history and did she dislike failure? We have no satisfactory answers to these questions.”

  Madame de Neuillant then married Françoise d’Aubigné to the comic writer Paul Scarron, who was an invalid many years her senior. She had been mistreated by Madame de Neuillant, and “the age was notoriously unsentimental about matrimony, nevertheless it was generally regarded at the time as a marriage that could only have been made by a young girl who was extremely cold-blooded and not very delicate,” wrote Esther. “The opinion has persisted ever since.” There is no record of the ceremony, which took place in April 1652, “and it is believed that it was destroyed after Madame de Maintenon married Louis XIV.” She spent her wedding night nursing her husband, who was in excruciating pain “that could only be partially alleviated by doses of opium.”

  So ends the longest version of Esther’s manuscript.

  What she left out, in brief: That the poet, playwright, and novelist Scarron educated his young wife and introduced her to the brilliant company he kept, and Françoise, now Madame Scarron, became one of the attractions of his salon. Scarron died when Françoise was in her mid-twenties, leaving her with culture and connections but no money. After some years of struggle, friends at court helped her obtain a royal sinecure. Madame Scarron became close to salonnières and aristocrats, including Mademoiselle de Scudéry, Madame de Sévigné, and Madame de Montespan, and she did not succumb, or she did, to the advances of various admirers. In 1670, Madame de Montespan, then the king’s favorite mistress, asked Madame Scarron to become the secret governess to Montespan’s children with him. Madame Scarron’s learning and discretion were admired, and several years later, when Louis XIV legitimized these royal bastards, she accompanied the children to court. She became indispensable, as they say, to the king and was involved in a long power struggle with Montespan. The king gave her the château of Maintenon (or the money to purchase it) and, as a further sign of favor, created her the “Marquise de Maintenon.”

  For the next several decades, Madame de Maintenon was a focus of political intrigue and questions about her access to policymaking. The ext
ent of her influence on Louis XIV is still debated. She is generally held to have been powerful especially regarding religious matters—meaning both the politics of the day, from which religion was inseparable, and the king’s own spirituality, including his late-in-life turn to God after decades of licentiousness. Her own increasingly fervent Catholicism included entanglement in offshoots of doctrine (such as Jansenism and Quietism), which endangered both her own position at court and the monarchy itself, because of Louis XIV’s tenuous relationship with Rome. She urged conversion on her Huguenot relatives and essentially kidnapped a niece and raised her a Catholic. For many years she was loathed by Protestants and said to have been responsible for the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, the treaty of toleration of Protestants in France that her grandfather had helped broker—an accusation that has now been discredited. (Esther indicates in passing that Louis XIV made this decision with Maintenon’s approval.) It is believed that Maintenon urged Louis XIV to renounce his mistresses and reconcile with his wife (which he did), even as she continued her intimacy with him. Her marriage to the king followed shortly after the queen’s death in July 1683.

  She was indisputably a powerful educator, making something of herself and of other women through self-instruction and teaching. In the early 1680s, she founded a school for the daughters of impoverished aristocrats as an alternative to the convent. The school was eventually established at Saint-Cyr, near Versailles, and the excellence of its curriculum was widely acknowledged: It served as a model for women’s education in France, inspiring the founding of other secular institutions. From Racine, then Louis XIV’s official historian, she commissioned two plays on biblical themes—Esther and Athalie—for the students. Their performances before the court were such successes, inviting courtiers’ excessive attention to the students and dangerous rumors about the girls’ chastity, that to save the students’ reputations, the school’s, and her own, Madame de Maintenon was forced to transform Saint-Cyr into a religious institution, subject to the relatively liberal Order of St. Augustine. She devoted enormous energy to the school, and her lectures to the faculty and students, the dramatic dialogues (“Conversations”) and proverb plays she composed for the young women, and her correspondence (thousands of letters, first published in the nineteenth century and thought by some to rival those of Madame de Sévigné) are a remarkable and still underread part of French literature. After the king’s death in 1715, she left Versailles and retreated to Saint-Cyr, where she died on April 15, 1719.

  All of these cunning passages were part of Esther’s monologues about the sublime governess. But they did not make it into print.

  When Nancy Mitford, who had become a close friend of Esther’s, decided to write about Madame de Pompadour, she asked and received Esther’s permission to do so and borrowed many of Esther’s books, carting them back and forth between their Paris apartments. It is probable that Esther had already abdicated the Pompadour project. It seems clear that she was not troubled by feelings of ownership of her subject, or by the paranoia about priority that often afflicts biographers. Several years earlier she had written that her work on Pompadour was foundering on her attempt to tell the story of that intensely political woman in the context of the world war of her day. “The writing is going well—better than I expected,” she reported to Chester in 1943, “but I have tackled something…that was much bigger than I bargained for—the political implications of the Seven Years War and the whole change that took place on the face of the world are not going to be easy and I have had to revise my outline considerably.”

  Maintenon was different: a mark of Esther’s engagement with the past almost from the beginning; a constant companion and burden for the last decade and a half of her life. She noted Maintenon’s birth and death dates in her correspondence and quoted her constantly: “‘My God, how sad life is, I cannot understand why we dread death.’—Mme. de Maintenon never spoke more wisely than that,” she wrote to Sybille in the spring of 1949. A few months later she cited her to praise Eleanor Roosevelt:

  As Madame de Maintenon once wrote, “I know that God has his saints in every condition” but then went on to say that she was unable to recognize any of them among the denizens of the court of France—it is strange that one should turn up in this age in the U.S., in the most unlikely position of all,—the wife of a president. Mrs. R. and her life have the grandeur and simplicity of an integrity and a virtue that have proved insusceptible to corruption. At a time in history when it is not very reassuring to belong to the human race, I feel personally grateful to her, for having reasserted by simply being what she is, the moral dignity and stature of mankind.

  Watching a play at the Comédie Française, she imagined “that ex-Huguenot, the Sublime Governess…nodd[ing] a qualified approval to some of” the swipes at the Catholic Church in the dramatization of André Gide’s anticlericalist tale, Les Caves du Vatican. When she became close to Eileen Hennessy, of the Cognac-making family, and stayed at her house in the Charente, she wrote to Sybille that the area was associated with Maintenon’s early life and that a local museum had “many relics…of her discreet and pious progress through the world.”

  These references, both mocking and admiring, were also a way for Esther to tell friends that she was at work on her book. Some of them were puzzled that the imagination of a committed American Democrat should be so fired by the environs of “monarchy incarnate.” Maintenon’s rags-to-riches story is different from but resonates with the American version of that trajectory. The extent to which her life seems to be the stuff of facts that speak for themselves, of facts that are irretrievable, and of improbable fictions also fed Esther’s thinking about her. The extent to which all biography is autobiography, as Emerson wrote, meant that Françoise d’Aubigné’s precociousness and scholarship, her mixed Protestant and Catholic parentage, her early, independent thinking about religion, her troubled relations with her mother and preference for her father, her political acumen and access to policymakers, and her deep affection for an older woman were all ways for Esther to tell, or not tell, her own story. Maintenon’s written work, like Esther’s, also had a complex relation to her speech, much of it originating in the hundreds of talks she gave to the students and faculty of Saint-Cyr, which they transcribed and she then reviewed and corrected.

  Another way of thinking about Esther’s attachment to this figure has to do with definitions of modernity, which historians sometimes date not from the Industrial Revolution, the turn of the twentieth century, or the First World War but from the Reformation. Here it is possible to see Esther’s work on Madame de Maintenon not only as a fascination with a distant, monarchist—albeit personally resonant—history, but also as part of her attempt to think about the past in the political present. Living in Europe after the Second World War, in the wake and still the midst of destructive secular creeds that had been wielded with religious fervor, Esther was studying a woman whose life was shaped by an earlier moment of devastating violence over doctrine. The wars of religion had been followed by the rise of liberal democracies all over Europe—forms of government that were supposed to have prevented anything like fascism. Studying Maintenon in the postwar years, she was also remaining skeptical about creating the present either through clean breaks with the past or through a return to some mythically pure origin.

  In her correspondence and in her manuscript, Esther often described a problem of documentation. “Nearly all the information we have about her,” she wrote, “is contained in the autobiographical fragments in her letters, in her conversations with the nuns of Saint Cyr which they carefully noted down; and in the memoirs of her companion and secretary, Mademoiselle d’Aumale, and of her cousin Madame de Caylus.” But Esther also called this problem of documentation a question of character. Maintenon was vexing because she left so few traces: Esther expressed this idea repeatedly, to the point that the most salient feature of Maintenon’s character that emerges from Esther’s writing is her inaccessibility. “Like so m
any of her emotions, Madame de Maintenon kept it to herself,” she wrote of Françoise’s feelings about her father, Constant d’Aubigné. Maintenon’s account of her conversion, “like many of [her] confidences…was extremely limited.” When she married Louis XIV, “she confided” to her brother, “in her reticent way, her own feelings about her incredible elevation. ‘It is a personal adventure that cannot be communicated to others’; she wrote…and as far as we know that was her last word on her [the] subject.” The third epigraph Esther entered in the notebook draft announces Maintenon’s refusal to be portrayed: “If I were to tell the story of my life I would not be believed.” In another version, Esther quoted this statement as “I shall not write my life: I cannot tell everything; and what I could tell would not be believed.”

  Esther, Sybille Bedford, and unidentified friend, circa 1950s (Private collection)

  Of course, her focus on Maintenon’s reticence and “baffling character” was also a way to name her own frustration and ambivalence. In 1955, Nancy Mitford, “determined” that Esther complete this work, interested her publisher, Hamish Hamilton, in it. The prospect filled Esther with loathing for herself and for Maintenon. “I am really afraid now that I will have to finish the book about this unsympathetic and very important woman who as a whole disgusts me even more than I am disgusted by my self,” she wrote to Sybille. When Mitford talked about her own plan to write the life of Voltaire, Esther told her that “it would not be more difficult than Madame de Maintenon & certainly less depressing.” Yet Margaret Marshall’s move from The Nation to an editorial position at Harcourt Brace, and Marshall’s appreciation of a “fragment” of the book (probably forwarded by Sybille), “delighted” Esther. (The publisher had apparently agreed to a book on Maintenon instead of Pompadour.) “It will be a great help to me to have someone like Margaret at Harcourt Brace,” she wrote to Sybille.