The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete

M >> Madame La Marquise De Montespan >> The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete


M. de la Roche-Guyon and M. de Liancourt, sons of La Rochefoucauld, who
expressed themselves with the same boldness, went so far as to say of
their ruler that he was but a stage and tinsel king. The son-in-law of
Louvois accused him of being most courageous in his gallery, but of
turning pale on the eve, and at the moment, of an action; and
D'Alincourt, son of Villeroi, carried his outrages further still. No one
knows better than myself how unjust these accusations were, and are. I
was sensible of the mortification such a reading must have caused to the
most sensitive, the most irritable of princes; but I rejoiced at the
humiliation that the lady in waiting felt for her share in this
unpardonable correspondence. The annoyance that I read for some days on
her handsome face consoled me, for the time being, for her great success
at my expense.

Madame la Princesse de Conti, whom the King, up to this time, had not
only cherished but adored, found also, in those documents, the term of
excessive favour. A letter from her to her husband said: "I have just
given myself a maid of honour, wishing to spare Madame de Maintenon the
trouble, or the pleasure, of giving me one herself."

She was summoned to Versailles, as she may very well have expected. The
King, paying no attention to her tears, said to her: "I believed in your
affection; I have done everything to deserve it; it is lamentable to me
to be unable to count on it longer. Your cruel letter is in Madame de
Maintenon's hands. She will let you read it again before committing it
to the fire, and I beg you to inform her what is the harm she has done
you."

"Madame," said Madame de Maintenon to her, when she saw her before her,
"when your amiable mother left this Court, where the slightest prosperity
attracts envy, I promised her to take some care of your childhood, and I
have kept my word.

"I have always treated you with gentleness and consideration; whence
proceeds your hate against me of to-day? Is your young heart capable of
it? I believed you to be a model of gratitude and goodness."

"Madame," replied the young Princess, weeping, "deign to pardon this
imprudence of mine and to reconcile me with the King, whom I love so
much."

"I have not the credit which you assume me to have," replied the lady in
waiting, coldly. "Except for the extreme kindness of the King you would
not be where you are, and you take it ill that I should be where I am! I
have neither desired nor solicited the arduous rank that I occupy; I need
resignation and obedience to support such a burden." Madame de Maintenon
resumed her work. The Princess, not daring to interrupt her silence,
made the bow that was expected of her and withdrew.

The Marquis de Louvois, when he read what his own son-in-law dared to
write of the monarch, grew pale and swooned away with grief. He cast
himself several times before the feet of his master, asking now the
punishment and now the pardon of a criminal and a madman.

"I believed myself to be loved by your family," cried the King. "What
must I do, then, to be loved? And, great God! with what a set I am
surrounded!"

All these things transpired. Soon we saw the father of the audacious De
Liancourt arrive like a man bereft of his wits. He ran to precipitate
himself at the feet of the King.

"M. de La Rochefoucauld," said the prince to him, "I was ignorant, until
this day, that I was lacking in what is called martial prowess; but I
shall at least have, on this occasion, the courage to despise the
slanderous slights of these presumptuous youths. Do not talk to me of
the submissions and regrets of your two sons, who are unworthy of you;
let them live as far away from me as possible; they do not deserve to
approach an honest man, such as their King."

The Prince de Turenne, son of the Duc de Bouillon, and Prince Eugene of
Savoy, third or fourth son of the Comtesse de Soissons (Olympe Mancini),
had accompanied their cousins De Conti on this knightly expedition; all
these gentlemen returned at the conclusion of the war, except Prince
Eugene, a violent enemy of the King.

[The Prince de Turenne was in bad odour at Court ever since he had
separated Monseigneur from his young wife by exaggerating that Princess's
small failings.--MADAME DE MONTESPAN'S NOTE.]

This young Prince of the second branch, seeing his mother's disgrace
since the great affair of the poison, hated me mortally. He carried his
treachery so far as to attribute to me the misfortunes of Olympe, saying,
and publishing all over Paris, that I had incited accusers in order to be
able to deprive her forcibly of her superintendence. This post, which
had been sold to me for four hundred thousand francs, had been paid for
long since; that did not prevent Eugene from everywhere affirming the
contrary.

Since the flight or exile of his lady mother, he had taken it into his
head to dream of the episcopate, and to solicit Pere de la Chaise on the
subject. But the King, who does not like frivolous or absurd figures in
high offices, decided that a little man with a deformity would repel
rather than attract deference at a pinnacle of dignity of the priesthood.

Refused for the episcopate, M. de Soissons thought he might offer himself
as a colonel. His Majesty, who did not know the military ways of this
abbe, refused him anew, both as an abbe and as a hunchback, and as a
public libertine already degraded by his irregularities.

From all these refusals and mortifications there sprung his firm resolve
to quit France. He had been born there; he left all his family there
except his mother; he declared himself its undying enemy, and said
publicly in Germany that Louis XIV. would shed tears of blood for the
injury and the affront which he had offered him.

MM. de Conti, after the events in Hungary and at Vienna, returned to
France covered with laurels. They came to salute the King at Versailles.
His Majesty gave them neither a good nor a bad reception. The Princes
left the same day for Chantilly, where M. de Conde, their paternal
uncle, tried to curb their too romantic imaginations and guaranteed their
good behaviour in the future.

This life, sedentary or spent in hunting, began to weary them, when
overruling Providence was pleased to send them a diversion of the highest
importance. M. le Prince de Conti was seized suddenly with that burning
fever which announces the smallpox. Every imaginable care was useless;
he died of it and bequeathed, in spite of himself, a most premature and
afflicting widowhood to his young and charming spouse, who was not, till
long afterwards, let into the secret of his scandalous excesses.

M. de la Roche-sur-Yon, his only brother, was as distressed at his death
as though he had nothing to gain by it; he took immediately the name of
Conti, and doffed the other, which he had hitherto borne as a borrowed
title. The domain and county of La Roche-sur-Yon belongs to the Grande
Mademoiselle. She had been asked to make this condescension when the
young Prince was born. She agreed with a good grace, for the child, born
prematurely, did not seem likely to live.




CHAPTER XXXV.

Ninon at Court.--The King behind the Glass.--Anxiety of the Marquise on
the Subject of This Interview.--Visit to Madame de Maintenon.--Her Reply
and Her Ambiguous Promise.


Mademoiselle de l'Enclos is universally known in the world for the
agreeableness of her superior wit and her charms of face and person. When
Madame de Maintenon, after the loss of her father, arrived from
Martinique, she had occasion to make her acquaintance; and it seems that
it was Ninon who, seeing her debating between the offers of M. Scarron
and the cloister, succeeded in persuading her to marry the rich poet,
though he was a cripple, rather than to bury herself, so young, in a
convent of Ursulines or Bernardines, even were the convent in Paris.

At the death of the poet Scarron (who when he married, and when he died,
possessed only a life annuity), Mademoiselle d'Aubigne, once more in
poverty, found in Mademoiselle de l'Enclos a generous and persevering
friend, who at once offered her her house and table. Mademoiselle
d'Aubigne passed eight or ten months in the intimate society of this
philosophical woman. But her conscience, or her prudery, not permitting
her to tolerate longer a manner of life in which she seemed to detect
license, she quitted Ninon, advising her to renounce coquetry, whilst the
other was advising her to abandon herself to it.

There, where Madame Scarron found the tune of good society with wit, she
looked upon herself as in her proper sphere, as long as no open scandal
was brought to her notice. She consented still to remain her friend; but
the fear of passing for an approver or an accomplice prevented her from
remaining if there were any publicity. It was not exactly through her
scruples, it was through her vanity. I have had proof of this on various
occasions, and I have made no error.

The pretended amours of Mademoiselle d'Aubigne and the Marquis de
Villarceaux, Ninon's friend, are an invention of malicious envy. I
justified Madame Scarron on the matter before the King, when I asked her
for the education of the Princes; and having rendered her this justice,
from conviction rather than necessity, I shall certainly not charge her
with it to-day. Madame de Maintenon possesses a fund of philosophy which
she does not reveal nor confess to everybody. She fears God in the
manner of Socrates and Plato; and as I have seen her more than once make
game, with infinite wit, of the Abbe Gobelin, her confessor, who is a
pedant and avaricious, I am persuaded that she knows much more about it
than all these proud doctors in theology, and that she would be
thoroughly capable of confessing her confessor.

She had remained, then, the friend of Ninon, but at heart and in
recollection, without sending her news or seeing her again. Mademoiselle
de l'Enclos, rich, disinterested, and proud of her independent position,
learned with pleasure the triumph of her former friend, but without
writing to her or congratulating her. Ninon, by the consent of all those
who have come near her, is good-nature itself. One of her relations, or
friends, was a candidate for a vacant post as farmer-general, and
besought her to make some useful efforts for him.

"I have no one but Madame de Maintenon," she replied to this relation.
And the other said to her:

"Madame de Maintenon? It is as though you had the King himself!"

Mademoiselle de l'Enclos, trimming her pen with her trusty knife, wrote
to the lady in waiting an agreeable and polished letter, one of those
letters, careful without stiffness, that one writes, indulging oneself a
little with the intention of getting oneself read.

The letter of solicitation seemed so pretty to the lady in waiting that
she made the King peruse it.

"This is an excellent opportunity for me," said the prince at once, "to
see with my own eyes this extraordinary, person, of whom I have so long
heard talk. I saw her one day at the opera, but just when she was
getting into her carriage; and my incognito did not permit me to approach
her. She seemed to me small, but well made. Her carriage drove off like
a flash."

To meet this curiosity which the King displayed, it was agreed that
Madame de Maintenon, on the pretext of having a better consultation,
should summon Mademoiselle de l'Enclos to Versailles, and that in one of
the alcoves of the chapel she should be given a place which should put
her almost in front of his Majesty.

She arrived some minutes before mass. Madame de Maintenon received her
with marked attention, mingled with reserve, promised her support with
the ministers when the affair should be discussed, and made her promise
to pass the entire day, at Versailles, for the King was obliged to visit
the new gardens at Marly.

The time for mass being come, Madame de Maintenon said to the fair
Epicurean, with a smile: "You are one of us, are you not? The music will
be delicious in the chapel to-day; you will not have a moment of
weariness."

Ninon, meeting this slight reproach with a smile of propriety, replied
that she adored and respected everything which the monarch respected.

During the service, the King, tranquilly, secluded in his golden box,
could see and examine the lady at his leisure, without compromising
himself or embarrassing her by his gaze. As for her, her decent and
quite appropriate attitude merited for her the approval of her old
friend, of the King, and of the most critical eyes.

The monarch, in effect, departed, not for the Chateau of Marly, but for
Trianon; and hardly had he reached there before, in a little, very close
carriage, he was brought back to Versailles. He went up to Madame de
Maintenon's apartments by the little staircase in the Prince's Court, and
stole into the glass closet without being observed, except by a solitary
lackey.

The ladies, believing themselves to be alone and at liberty, talked
without ceremony or constraint, as though they had been but twenty years
old. The King was very much grieved at the things which were said, but
he heard, without losing a word, the following dialogue or interview:

NINON DE L'ENCLOS.--It is not my preservation which should surprise you,
since from morning to night I breathe that voluptuous air of independence
which refreshes the blood, and puts in play its circulation. I am
morally the same person whom you came to see in the pretty little house
in the Rue de Tournelles. My dressing-gown, as you well know, was my
preferred and chosen garb. To-day, as then, Madame la Marquise, I should
choose to place on my escutcheon the Latin device of the towns of San
Marino and Lucca,--Libertas. You have complimented me on my beauty; I
congratulate you upon yours, and I am surprised that you have so kept and
preserved it in the midst of the constraints and servitude that grandeur
and greatness involve.

MADAME DE MAINTENON.--At the commencement, I argued as you argue, and
believed that I should never get to the year's end without disgust.
Little by little I imposed silence upon my emotions and my regrets. A
life of great activity and occupation, by separating us, as it were, from
ourselves, extinguishes those exacting niceties, both of our proper
sensibility, and of our self-conceit. I remembered my sufferings, my
fears, and my privations after the death of that poor man;--[It was so
that she commonly spoke of her husband, Scarron.]--and since labour has
been the yoke imposed by God on every human being, I submitted with a
good grace to the respectable labour of education. Few teachers are
attached to their pupils; I attached myself to mine with tenderness, with
delight. It is true that it was my privilege to find the King's children
amiable and pretty, as few children are.

NINON DE L'ENCLOS.--From the most handsome and amiable man in the world
there could not come mediocre offspring. M. du Maine is your idol; the
King has given him his noble bearing, with his intelligence; and you have
inoculated him with your wit. Is it true that Madame de Montespan is no
longer your friend? That is a rumour which has credit in the capital;
and if the thing is true I regret it, and am sorry for you.

MADAME DE MAINTENON.--Madame de Montespan, as all Paris knows, obtained
my pension for me after the death of the Queen-mother. This service,
comparable with a favour, will always remain in my heart and my memory. I
have thanked her a thousand times for it, and I always shall thank her
for it. At the time when the young Queen of Portugal charged herself
with my fate and fortune, the Marquise, who had known me at the Hotel
d'Albret, desired to retain me in France, where she destined for me the
children of the King. I did what she desired; I took charge of his
numerous children out of respect for my benefactor, and attachment to
herself. To-day, when their first education is completed, and his
Majesty has recompensed me with the gift of the Maintenon estate, the
Marquise pretends that my role is finished, that I was wrong to let
myself be made lady in waiting, and that the recognition due to her
imposes an obligation on me to obey her in everything, and withdraw from
this neighbourhood.

NINON DE L'ENCLOS.--Absolutely

MADAME DE MAINTENON.--Yes, really, I assure you.

NINON DE L'ENCLOS.--A departure? An absolute retreat? Oh, it is too
much! Does she wish you, then, to resign your office?

MADAME DE MAINTINON.--I cannot but think so, mademoiselle.

NINON DE L'ENCLOS.--Speaking personally, and for my private satisfaction,
I should be enchanted to see you quit the Court and return to society.
Society is your element. You know it by heart; you have shone there, and
there you would shine again. On reappearing, you would see yourself
instantly surrounded by those delicate and (pardon the expression)
sensuous minds who applauded with such delight your agreeable stories,
your brilliant and solid conversation. Those pleasant, idle hours were
lost to us when you left us, and I shall always remember them. At the
Court, where etiquette selects our words, as it rules our attitudes, you
cannot be yourself; I must confess that frankly. You do not paint your
lovely face, and I am obliged to you for that, madame; but it is
impossible for you to refrain from somewhat colouring your discourse, not
with the King, perhaps, whose always calm gaze transparently reveals the
man of honour, but with those eminences, those grandeurs, those royal and
serene highnesses, whose artificial and factitious perfumes already
filled your chapel before the incense of the sacrifice had wreathed its
clouds round the high altar.

The King, suddenly showing himself, somewhat to the surprise of the
ladies, said: "I have long wished, mademoiselle, this unique and
agreeable opportunity for which I am indebted to Madame de Maintenon. Be
seated, I pray you, and permit 'my Highness', slightly perfumed though I
be, to enjoy for a moment your witty conversation and society. What! The
atmosphere does not meet with your approval, and, in order to have
madame's society, you desire to disgust her with it herself, and deprive
us of her?"

"Sire," answered Ninon, "I have not enough power or authority to render
my intentions formidable, and my long regrets will be excused, I hope,
since, if madame left Versailles, she would cause the same grief there
that she has caused us."

"One has one's detractors in every conceivable locality. If Madame de
Maintenon has met with one at Versailles she would not be exempt from
them anywhere else. At Paris, you would be without rampart or armour, I
like to believe; but deign to grant me this preference,--I can very well
protect my friends. I think the town is ill-informed, and that Madame de
Montespan has no interest in separating madame from her children, who are
also mine.

"You will greatly oblige me, mademoiselle, if you will adopt this opinion
and publish it in your society, which is always select, though it is so
numerous."

Then the King, passing to other subjects, brought up, of his own accord,
the place of farmer-general, which happened to be vacant; and he said to
Mademoiselle de l'Enclos: "I promise you this favour with pleasure, the
first which you have ever solicited of me, and I must beg you to address
yourself to Madame de Maintenon on every occasion when your relations or
yourself have something to ask from me. You must see clearly,
mademoiselle, that it is well to leave madame in this place, as an agent
with me for you, and your particular ambassadress."

I learnt all these curious details five or six days later from a young
colonel, related to me, to whom Mademoiselle de l'Enclos narrated her
admission and interview at Versailles. In reproducing the whole of this
scene, I have not altered the sense of a word; I have only sought to make
up for the charm which every conversation loses that is reported by a
third party who was not actually an eyewitness.

This confidence informed me that prejudices were springing up against me
in the mind of the favourite. I went to see her, as though my visit were
an ordinary one, and asked her what one was to think of Ninon's interview
with the King.

"Yes," she said, "his Majesty has for a long time past had a great desire
to see her, as a person of much wit, and of whom he has heard people
speak since his youth. He imagined her to have larger eyes, and
something a little more virile in her physiognomy. He was greatly, and,
I must say, agreeably surprised, to find that he had been deceived. 'One
can see eyes of far greater size,' his Majesty told me, 'but not more
brilliant, more animated or amiable. Her mouth, admirably moulded, is
almost as small as Madame de Montespan's. Her pretty, almost round face
has something Georgian about it, unless I am mistaken. She says, and
lets you understand, everything she likes; she awaits your replies
without interruption; her contradictions preserve urbanity; she is
respectful without servility; her pleasant voice, although not of silver,
is none the less the voice of a nymph. In conclusion, I am charmed with
her.'"

"Does she believe me hostile to your prosperity, my dear Marquise?" I
said at once to Madame de Maintenon, who seemed slightly confused, and
answered: "Mademoiselle de l'Enclos is not personally of that opinion;
she had heard certain remarks to that effect in the salons of the town;
and I have given her my most explicit assurance that, if you should ever
cease to care for me, my inclination and my gratitude would be none the
less yours, madame, so long as I should live."

"You owe me those sentiments," I resumed, with a trifle too much fire; "I
have a right to count on them. But it is most painful to me, I confess,
after having given all my youth to the King, to see him now cool down,
even in his courtesy. The hours which he used to pass with me he gives
to you, and it is impossible that this innovation should not seem
startling here, since all Paris is informed of it, and Mademoiselle de
l'Enclos has discussed it with you."

"I owe everything that I am to the goodness of the King," she answered
me. "Would you have me, when he comes to me, bid him go elsewhere, to
you or somebody else, it matters not?"

"No, but I should be glad if your countenance did not, at such a moment,
expand like a sunflower; I should like you, at the risk of somewhat
belying yourself, to have the strength to moderate and restrain that vein
of talk and conversation of which you have given yourself the supremacy
and monopoly; I wish you had the generosity to show, now and again, less
wit. This sort of regime and abstinence would not destroy you off-hand,
and the worst that could result to you from it would be to pass in his
eyes for a woman of a variable and intermittent wit; what a great
calamity!"

"Ah, madame, what is it you suggest!" the lady in waiting replied to me,
almost taking offence. "I have never been eccentric or singular with any
one in the world, and you want me to begin with my King! It cannot be, I
assure you! Suggest to me reasonable and possible things, and I will
enter into all your views with all my heart and without hesitation."

This reply shocked me to the point of irritation.

"I believed you long to be a simple and disinterested soul," I said to
her, "and it was in this belief that I gave you my cordial affection. Now
I read your heart, and all your projects are revealed to me. You are not
only greedy of respect and consideration, you are ambitious to the point
of madness. The King's widowhood has awakened all your wild dreams; you
confided to me fifteen years ago that the soothsayer of the Marechale
d'Albret had predicted for you a sceptre and a crown."

At these words, the governess made me a sign to lower my voice, and said
to me, with an accent of candour and good faith, which it is impossible
for me to forget: "I confided to you at the time that puerility of
society, just as the Marechale and the Marshal (without believing it)
related it to all France. But this prognostication need not alarm you,
madame," she added; "a King like ours is incapable of such an
extravagance, and if he were to determine on it, it would not have my
countenance nor approval.

"I do not think that thus far I have passed due limits; the granddaughter
of a great noble, of a first gentleman of the chamber, I have been able
to become a lady in waiting without offending the eyes; but the lady in
waiting will never be Queen, and I give you my permission to insult me
publicly when I am."

Such was this conversation, to which I have not added a word. We shall
see soon how Madame de Maintenon kept her word to me, and if I am not
right in owing her a grudge for this promise with a double meaning, with
which it was her caprice to decoy me by her shuffling.




CHAPTER XXXVI.

Birth of the Duc d'Anjou.--The Present to the Mother.--The Casket of
Patience.--Departure of the King for the Army.--The King Turns a Deaf
Ear.--How That Concerns Madame de Maintenon.--The Prisoner of the
Bastille.--The Danger of Caricatures.--The Administrative
Thermometer.--Actors Who Can neither Be Applauded nor Hissed.--Relapse of
the Prisoner.--Scarron's Will.--A Fine Subject for Engraving.--Madame de
Maintenon's Opinion upon the Jesuits.--The Audience of the Green
Salon.--Portions from the Refectory.--Madame de Maintenon's Presence of
Mind.--I Will Make You Schoolmaster.