"I am very frank and very natural, and I say all that I have in
my heart." That is the motto that ought to be placed upon the
correspondence of Madame, which was chiefly written in German and
published from time to time in voluminous extracts at Strasburg and
beyond the Rhine. This correspondence, translated by fragments,
was made into a volume and called, very improperly, the "Memoirs
of Madame." Coming after other memoirs of the celebrated women of
the great century, it ran singularly counter to them in tone, and
caused great surprise. Now that the Memoirs of Saint-Simon have been
published in full, I will not say that the pages of the chronicle we
owe to Madame have paled, but they have ceased to astonish. They are
now recognized as good, naïve pictures, somewhat forced in colour,
rather coarse in feature, exaggerated and grimacing at times, but on
the whole good likenesses. The right method for judging of Madame's
correspondence, and thus of gaining insight to the history of that
period, is to see how Madame wrote, and in what spirit; also what she
herself was by nature and by education. For this purpose the letters
published by M. Menzel in German, and translated by M. Brunet, are
of great assistance to a knowledge of this singular and original
personage; to understand her properly it is not too much to say that
Germany and France must be combined.
Élisabeth-Charlotte, who married in 1671 Monsieur, brother of Louis
XIV., was born at Heidelberg in 1652. Her father, Charles-Louis, was
that Elector of the Palatinate who was restored to his States by the
Peace of Westphalia. From childhood Élisabeth-Charlotte was noted
for her lively mind, and her frank, open, vigorous nature. Domestic
peace had never reigned about the hearth of the Elector-Palatine; he
had a mistress, whom he married by the left hand, and the mother of
Élisabeth-Charlotte is accused of having caused the separation by
her crabbed temper. The young girl was confided to the care of her
aunt Sophia, Electress of Hanover, a person of merit, for whom she
always retained the feelings and gratitude of a loving daughter. To
her she addressed her longest and most confidential letters, which
would certainly surpass in interest those that are published, but M.
Menzel states that it is not known what became of them. All that part
of the life and youth of Madame would be curious and very useful to
recover. "I was too old," she says, "when I came to France to change
my character; the foundations were laid." While subjecting herself
with courage and resolution to the duties of her new position she kept
her German tastes; she confesses them and proclaims them before all
Versailles and all Marly; and the Court, then the arbiter of Europe,
to which it set the tone, would certainly have been shocked if it had
not preferred to smile.
From Marly after forty-three years' residence in France, Madame writes
(November 22, 1714): "I cannot endure coffee, chocolate, or tea,
and I do not understand how any one can like them; a good dish of
sauerkraut and smoked sausages is, to my mind, a feast for a king,
to which nothing is preferable; cabbage soup with lard suits me much
better than all the delicacies they dote on here." In the commonest
and most every-day things she finds another and a poorer taste than
in Germany. "The butter and milk," she says, after fifty years'
residence, "are not as good as ours; they have no flavour and taste
like water. The cabbages are not good either, for the soil is not
rich, but light and sandy, so that vegetables have no strength and the
cows cannot give good milk. _Mon Dieu!_ how I should like to eat the
dishes your cook prepares for you; they would be more to my taste than
those my _maître-d'hôtel_ serves up to me."
But she clung to her own country, her German stock, her "Rhin
allemand," by other memories than those of food and the national
cooking. She loved nature, the country, a free life, even a wild
one; the impressions of her childhood returned to her in whiffs of
freshness. Apropos of Heidelberg, rebuilt after the disasters, and
of a convent of Jesuits, or Franciscans, established on the heights,
"_Mon Dieu!_" she cries, "how many times I have eaten cherries on that
mountain, with a good bit of bread, at five in the morning! I was
gayer then than I am to-day." The brisk air of Heidelberg is with her
after fifty years' absence; and she speaks of it a few months before
her death to the half-sister Louise, to whom she writes: "There is
not in all the world a better air than that of Heidelberg; above all,
about the château where my apartment is; nothing better can be found."
In Germany, on the banks of the Neckar and the Rhine,
Élisabeth-Charlotte enjoyed the picturesque sites, her rambles
through the forests, Nature left to herself, and also the spots of
bourgeois plenty amid the wilder environment. "I love trees and
fields more than the finest palaces; I like a kitchen garden better
than a garden with statues and fountains; a brook pleases me a great
deal more than sumptuous cascades; in a word, all that is natural is
infinitely more to my taste than works of art or magnificence; the
latter only please at first sight; as soon as one is accustomed to
them they fatigue, and we care no more about them." In France she
was particularly fond of residing at Saint-Cloud, where she enjoyed
Nature with greater liberty. At Fontainebleau she often walked out on
foot and went a league through the forest. On her arrival in France
and first appearance at Court, she told her physician when presented
to her that "she did not need him; she had never been bled or purged,
and when she did not feel well she always walked six miles on foot,
which cured her." Mme. de Sévigné who relates this, seems to conclude,
with the majority of the Court, that the new Madame was overcome with
her grandeur and spoke like a person who is not accustomed to such
surroundings. Mme. de Sévigné is mistaken; Madame was in no degree
overcome by her greatness. She felt herself born for the high rank
of Monsieur's wife, and would have felt in her right place if higher
still. But Mme. de Sévigné though she herself walked with pleasure in
her woods at Livry and her park des Rochers, did not divine the proud
young girl, so brusque and wild, who ate with delight her bit of bread
and cherries plucked from the trees at five in the morning on the
hills of Heidelberg.
Madame's marriage was not made to please her. In France this has been
concealed; in Germany it was said quite plainly. Her father, the
Elector, hoped by this alliance to buy the safety of his dominions,
always threatened by the French. Like a pious daughter she obeyed; but
she could not refrain from saying: "I am the political lamb, about to
be sacrificed for my country." The _lamb_, after we once know her,
seems a singular term to choose for so vigorous a victim; but the
comparison is just, all the same, so tender and good was the heart
within her.
The rôle that Madame conceived for herself in France was that of
preserving her native country from the horrors of war, and of being
useful to it in the different schemes which agitated the Court of
France and might in the end overthrow it. In this she failed; and the
failure was to her a poignant grief. She was even made the innocent
cause of fresh disasters to the land she loved when, on the death of
her father and her brother (who left no children), Louis XIV. set up
a claim to the Palatinate on her account. Instead of bringing pledges
and guarantees of peace, she found herself a pretext and a means for
war. The devastation and the too famous incendiarism of the Palatinate
which the struggles of ambition brought about caused her inexpressible
grief. "When I think of those flames, shudders run over me. Every
time I try to go to sleep I see Heidelberg on fire, and I start up
in bed, so that I am almost ill in consequence." She speaks of this
incessantly, and bleeds and weeps for it after many years. For Louvois
she retained an eternal hatred. "I suffer bitter pain," she writes
thirty years later (November 3, 1718), "when I think of all that M. de
Louvois burned up in the Palatinate; I believe he is burning terribly
in the other world, for he died so suddenly he had no time to repent."
Madame's virtue in this and other conjunctures was in being faithful
to France and to Louis XIV., all the while torn by distress within
her secret self. She never ceases to interest herself in the fate of
her unhappy country, and in its resurrection after so many disasters.
"I love that prince," she said of the Elector of another branch which
was reigning in 1718, "because he loves the Palatinate. I can easily
imagine how pained he was when he saw how little remained in the ruins
of Heidelberg; the tears come into my eyes when I think of it, and I
am so sad." Nevertheless, she regrets the religious bickerings and
persecutions introduced into the country, and her own powerlessness
to intervene for the protection of those who are persecuted. "I see
but too plainly now," she writes in 1719, "that God did not will that
I should accomplish any good in France, for, in spite of my efforts,
I have never been able to be useful to my native country. It is true
that when I came to France it was purely in obedience to my father, my
uncle, and my aunt, the Electress of Hanover; my inclination did in
nowise bring me here." Thus, in the marriage, apparently so brilliant,
which she contracted with the brother of Louis XIV. Madame cared for
one thing only, namely, to serve and protect her German land from
French policy; and on that very side where politics (to which she was
always a stranger) touched her most, she had the grief of failing.
When the marriage of Élisabeth-Charlotte was negotiated, it became a
question of converting her. The erudite and witty Chévreau, who was
at the Court of the Elector Palatine in the capacity of councillor,
flattered himself that he contributed to that result by daily
interviews with her of four hours in length for three weeks. One of
the orators who eulogized Madame at the time of her death, her almoner
(the Abbé de Saint-Géri de Magnas), said as to this: "When asked in
marriage for Monsieur by Louis XIV. the principal condition was that
she should embrace the Catholic religion. Neither ambition nor levity
had any share in this change; the respect and tenderness she felt for
Mme. la Princesse Palatine, her aunt, who was Catholic, prevented
her from refusing to be instructed. She listened to Père Jourdain, a
Jesuit. Born with the rectitude which distinguished her all her life,
she did not resist the truth. Her abjuration was made at Metz."
Madame was, in truth, perfectly sincere in her conversion;
nevertheless, she carried into it something of her freedom of mind
and her independence of temper. "On my arrival in France," she says,
"they made me hold conferences about religion with three bishops. All
three differed in their beliefs; I took the quintessence of their
opinions and formed my own." In this catholic religion, thus defined
in the rough, which she believed and practised in perfect good faith,
there remained traces and several of the habits of her early faith.
She continued to read the Bible in German. She mentions that at that
period in France scarcely any one, even among the devout, read Holy
Scripture. The translations recently made of it had led to such
discussions and bitter quarrels that the ecclesiastical authority
intervened and forbade the reading of them; which has ever since
remained a rarity in our country. Madame was therefore a notable
exception when, in her plan of life, she gave a great and regular
place to meditation on the Holy Book. She selected three days in the
week for that salutary practice. "After my son's visit," she writes
(November, 1717), "I sat down to table, and after dinner I took my
Bible and read four chapters of the book of Job, four Psalms, and two
chapters of Saint John, leaving the other two till this morning." And
she might have written the same thing on each of her appointed days.
On one occasion she was singing unconsciously the Calvinist psalms, or
the Lutheran canticles (for she mixed them up), while walking alone
in the Orangery at Versailles, when a painter who was at work on a
scaffolding came down hurriedly and threw himself at her feet, saying
with gratitude: "Is it possible, Madame, that you still remember our
Psalms?" The painter was a reformer and afterwards a refugee; she
relates the little story very touchingly.
She had nothing of the sectarian spirit. She blamed Luther for
wishing to make a separate Church; he ought to have confined himself,
she thought, to attacking abuses. She retained from him and from
other reformers, in spite of her conversion, a habit of invective
against religious Orders of all kinds; and on this subject she
bursts into tirades which are less those of a woman than of a pedant
of the sixteenth century or some doctor emancipated from the rue
Saint-Jacques. Gui Patin in a farthingale could not have expressed
himself differently. She corresponded with Leibnitz, who assured her
that she wrote German "not badly;" which pleased her much, for she
could not endure, she says, to see Germans despising and ignoring
their mother tongue. The letters that she wrote to Leibnitz would
be precious could they some day be recovered and published. She may
have gladly borrowed from that illustrious philosopher his idea of
an approach and fusion, a reconciliation, in short, between the
principal Christian communities, for she renders it, rather brusquely
as her manner was, when she says: "If they followed my advice all
the sovereigns would give orders that among all Christians, without
distinction of beliefs, people were to abstain from insulting
expressions, and that each and all were to believe and practise as
they saw fit." In the midst of that Court of Louis XIV., which was so
unanimous as to the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, she retained
the most inviolable ideas of tolerance. "It is not showing themselves
in any way Christian," she said, "to torture people for religious
reasons, and I think it monstrous; but when one examines things to
the bottom we find that religion is only a pretext; all is done from
policy and selfish interests. They are serving Mammon, and not God."
Later, she humanely intercedes with her son, the regent, to release
from the galleys the Reformers who had been sent there. But as it is
in Madame's temperament to exaggerate everything, even her own good
qualities, and to introduce a sort of incoherence into her efforts,
she goes far beyond her object when she expresses the wish that she
may see in the galleys, in the place of such poor innocents, those who
she thinks have persecuted them, and also other monks, especially the
Spanish monks, who resisted to the last in Barcelona the accession of
Louis XIV.'s grandson. "They preached in all the streets that no one
should surrender; and if I had my way those rascals would have gone
to the galleys in place of the poor Reformers who are languishing
there." That is Madame--in all her goodness of heart, extravagance of
language, and her frank, sincere religion of a mixed nature.
When she arrived in France at the age of nineteen no one expected all
this. The Court was filled with memories and regrets for the late
Madame, the amiable Henrietta, snatched away in the bloom of her charm
and grace. "Alas!" cries Mme. de Sévigné, speaking of the new-comer,
"alas! if _this_ Madame could only represent to us her whom we have
lost!" In place of a blithesome fairy and a being of enchantment, what
was it that suddenly appeared before them?
"Madame," says Saint-Simon, "was a princess of the olden time;
attached to honour, virtue, rank, grandeur, and inexorable as to their
observances. She was not without intellect; and what she saw she saw
very well. A good and faithful friend, trusty, true, and upright; easy
to prejudice and shock; very difficult to bring back from prejudice;
coarse, and dangerous in her public outbursts; very German in her
habits; frank, indifferent to all propriety and all delicacy for
herself and for others; sober, solitary, and full of notions. She
loved dogs and horses, hunting and theatres passionately, and was
never seen except in full dress or in a man's wig and riding-habit."
He concludes his portrait admirably in these words: "The figure and
rusticity of a Swiss, but capable withal of a tender and inviolable
friendship."
Introduced at Court by her aunt, the illustrious Princess Palatine,
Anne of Gonzaga, in nothing was she in keeping with it,--neither in
spirit, nor in the gifts of insinuation and conciliatory conduct, nor
in caution. Succeeding the first Madame, she seemed even farther aloof
from it, more completely a contrast in manners, in the quality and
turn of her thoughts, in delicacy, in short, in everything. Madame,
throughout her life, was, and must necessarily have been, the contrary
of many things and many persons about her; she was original, at any
rate, and in all ways Herself.
It seems an irony of fate that gave as second wife to Monsieur, that
prince so weak and so effeminate, a woman who in tastes was far more
like a man, and who always regretted she was not born a boy. Madame
gayly relates how, in her youth, feeling her vocation as a cavalier
very strongly, she was always expecting some miracle of Nature in
her favour. With this idea she devoted herself as much as she could
to all manly exercises and perilous leaping. She cared much more for
swords and guns than for dolls. But above all she proves how little
of a woman's nature was in her by the want of delicacy, or, to speak
plainly, the lack of modesty in what she says. She is honesty itself,
virtue, fidelity, honour; but also, at times, indecency and coarseness
personified. She speaks of everything indiscriminately, like a man, is
never disgusted by any language, and never goes by four roads when
she has to express something which would be difficult and embarrassing
to any one but herself. Contrary to the nature of women, she has no
desire to please, and no coquetry. Being asked one day why she never
glanced into a mirror in passing it, "Because," she replied, "I have
too much self-love to like to see how ugly I am." The fine portrait by
Rigaud gives us a perfect likeness of her in her old age, portly, fat,
a double chin and red cheeks, with dignity of carriage nevertheless,
and a proud bearing, but an expression of kindness in the eyes and
smile.[1] She herself was pleased at times to record her ugliness; one
might even suppose that she valued it.
"It is no matter whether one is handsome or not; a fine face changes
soon, but a good conscience is always good. You must remember very
little of me if you do not rank me among the ugly ones; I have always
been so, and I am more so now because of the small-pox. My waist is
monstrous in size; I am as square as a cube; my skin is red, mottled
with yellow; my hair is getting gray; my nose is honeycombed with the
small-pox, and so are my cheeks; I have a large mouth and bad teeth;
and there's the portrait of my pretty face."
Certainly no one was ever ugly with more spirit and light-heartedness.
Occasionally there slips in beneath Madame's pen and her expressions
a natural vein of Rabelais and the grotesque. She fills in that way a
unique corner in the Court of Louis XIV. Knowing well what was due to
her rank and never departing from it, there are many occasions when
she is incongruous with it and violates decorum.
It was perhaps by this naïve brusqueness, and also by her solid
qualities as an honest woman (I was going to say an honest man),
that she pleased Louis XIV., so that between herself and him there
was formed a friendship which was not without its singularity, and
which at first sight seems surprising. Mme. de Sévigné, in a letter
to her daughter, seems to think that Madame felt for Louis XIV. (as
the preceding Madame had done) an inclination that was more or less
romantic, and which affected her without her admitting to herself
exactly what it was. There is a little too much that is far-fetched
in all this. In general, as I have already remarked, Mme. de Sévigné
understands Madame very little, and does not give herself the trouble
to seek the meaning of a nature so little French. When she hears that
the princess fainted with grief at the sudden news of the death of her
father, the Elector Palatine, Mme. de Sévigné jests about it thus: "On
this, Madame began to cry and weep and make a strange noise; they said
she fainted, but I do not believe it; she seems to me incapable of
that sign of weakness. All that death could do would be to sober her
spirits,"--_fixer ses esprits_, because _ses esprits_ (in the language
of the physics of the day) were always in movement and great agitation.
But let us leave for a moment such French pleasantry and this facility
for trifling with everything and over-refining all things. Madame,
married in so sad and hapless a manner, and with whom one had only to
talk, it was said, to be disgusted at once with the painful conditions
of marriage,--Madame was not the woman to fall back upon romance to
console her for reality. Thrown into the midst of a brilliant but
false Court, full at that time of gallantry and pleasures which merely
covered ambitions and rivalries, she distinguished with an instinct of
good sense and a certain pride of race the person to whom she could
attach herself in the midst of all these people, and she turned with
her natural uprightness to the most honest man among them, namely, to
Louis XIV. himself. A Jesuit, who pronounced a funeral oration over
Madame, Père Cathalan, has said on this subject all that was best to
say. In the kingdom at that time was a king who was worthy of being
one; with the good qualities we know well, combined with defects which
every one about him sought to favour and encourage; a king who was
essentially a man of merit, "always master and always king, but more
of an honest man and Christian than he was master or king."
"It was this merit that touched her," says Père Cathalan, very truly.
"A taste for, and, if I may so express myself, a sympathy of greatness
attached Madame to Louis XIV. Inward affinities make noble attachments
of esteem and respect; and great souls, though the features of their
greatness may differ, feel, and resemble one another. She esteemed,
she honoured, shall I venture to say she loved that great king because
she was great herself. She loved him when he was greater than his
fortunes; she loved him still more when he was greater than his
sorrows. We saw her giving to the dying monarch her bitter tears,
giving them again to his memory, seeking him in that superb palace so
filled with his presence and his virtues, saying often how she missed
him, and feeling always the wound of his death,--a sentiment which the
glory of her son, the regent, could never take away."
Madame was agreeable to Louis XIV. by her frankness, her open nature;
she amused him with her repartees and her lively talk; she made him
laugh with all his heart, for (a rare thing at Courts) she liked
joy for joy's sake. "Joy is very good for the health," thought she;
"the silliest thing is to be sad." She broke the monotony of Court
ceremony, the long silent meals, the slow minuets of all kinds. What
would have been incongruous in others had a certain spice in her; she
had her privileges. "When the king dislikes to say a thing directly
to any one, he addresses his speech to me; he knows very well that I
don't constrain myself in conversation, and that diverts him. At table
he is obliged to talk with me because nobody else will say a word."
She was not so inferior to the king as might be thought; or rather she
was not inferior to him at all except in politeness, in moderation, in
the spirit of consistency and sobriety. In certain respects she judged
him with much intelligence, and with freer and broader good sense than
he was capable of himself; she thought him ignorant in many ways, and
she was right. What she valued most in him was his uprightness of
feeling, and the accuracy of his _coup-d'oeil_ when left to himself;
also the quality of his mind, the charm of his intercourse, the
excellent expression of his thoughts,--it was, in short, a certain
loftiness of nature which attracted and charmed her in Louis XIV. She
aided more than any other in consoling him and diverting his mind
after the death of the Duchesse de Bourgogne; she went to him every
evening at the permitted hour, and she saw that he was pleased with
her company. "There is no one but Madame who does not leave me now,"
said Louis XIV. "I see that she is glad to be with me." Madame has
ingenuously expressed the sort of open and sincere affection that
she felt for Louis XIV. by saying: "If the king had been my father I
could not have loved him more than I did love him, and I had pleasure
in being with him." When the king's health declined and he neared
his last hour, we find Madame laying bare her grief in her letters;
she, whose son was about to become regent, she dreads more than any
one the change of reign. "The king is not well," she says, August
15, 1715, "and it troubles me to the point of being half ill myself;
I have lost both sleep and appetite. God grant I may be mistaken!
but if what I fear should happen it would be for me the greatest of
misfortunes." She relates the last scenes of farewell with true and
visible emotion. The little good that has been done in the final years
of that long reign she attributes to Louis XIV.; and all that was bad
she imputes to her whom she considers an evil genius and the devil
personified,--to Mme. de Maintenon.
And here we come to Madame's great antipathy, to what in her is almost
unimaginable prejudice, hatred, and animosity so violent that they
become at times comical. And truly, if Madame at a given moment had
really been in love with Louis XIV., and if she had hated in Mme. de
Maintenon the rival who supplanted her, she could not have expressed
herself otherwise. But there is no need of that sort of explanation
for a nature so easy to prejudice, so difficult to placate, and so
wholly in opposition and contrast to the point of departure and
proceedings of Mme. de Maintenon. Hers were antipathies of race, of
condition, of temperament, which long years passed in the presence,
the continual sight, the rigid restraint of their object only
cultivated, secretly fomented, and exasperated. Who has not seen such
long-suppressed enmities which explode when an opening is made for
them?
Madame, pre-eminently princess of a sovereign house, who never,
with all her natural human qualities and her free and easy ways,
forgot the duties of birth and grandeur, she of whom it was said,
"No great personage ever knew her rights better or made them
better felt by others,"--Madame held nothing in so much horror and
contempt as misalliances. The gallery at Versailles long echoed
with the resounding blow she applied to her son on the day when,
having consented to marry the natural daughter of Louis XIV., he
approached his mother according to custom, to kiss her hand. Now of
all misalliances what could be greater or more inexcusable to her eyes
than that which placed Mme. de Maintenon beside Louis XIV.?
Madame, natural, frank, letting her feelings willingly escape her,
liking to pour them out, often in excess beyond themselves and
observing no caution, could not away with the cold procedure, prudent,
cautious, mysterious, polite, and unassailable, of a person to whom
she attributed a thousand schemes blacker and deeper than those of
hell.
She disliked her for little things and disliked her for great ones.
She supposed that it was Mme. de Maintenon who, in concert with Père
de La Chaise, had plotted and carried through the persecution of the
Reformers; in this she was not only human, but she found herself
once more a little of a Calvinist or a Lutheran with a touch of the
old leaven; she thought close at hand what the refugees in Holland
were writing from afar. She believed she saw in Mme. de Maintenon
a Tartuffe in a sage-coloured gown. And besides--another grievance
almost as serious!--if there was no longer any etiquette at Court, if
ranks were no longer preserved and defined, Mme. de Maintenon was the
cause of it.
"There is no longer a Court in France," she writes, "and it is the
fault of the Maintenon, who, finding that the king would not declare
her queen, was determined there should be no more great functions, and
has persuaded the young dauphine [the Duchesse de Bourgogne] to stay
in her, Mme. de Maintenon's rooms, where there is no distinction of
rank or dignity. Under pretext of its being a game, the old woman has
induced the dauphine and the princesses to wait upon her at her toilet
and meals; she has even persuaded them to hand her the dishes, change
her plates, and pour what she drank. Everything is topsy-turvy, and
none of them know their right place nor what they are. I have never
mixed myself up in all that: when I go to see the lady I place myself
close to her niche in an armchair, and I never help her either at
her meals or her toilet. Some persons have advised me to do as the
dauphine and the princesses do, but I answer: 'I was never brought up
to do servile things, and I am too old to play childish games.' Since
then no one has said anything more about it."
I should never end if I enumerated all the reasons by which Madame
brought herself, gradually and insensibly, to a species of mania which
seizes her whenever she has to speak of Mme. de Maintenon, for there
are no terms that she does not employ about her. On this subject she
drops into whatever the grossest popular credulity could imagine in
its days of madness; she sees in Mme. de Maintenon, even after the
death of Louis XIV. and while buried at Saint-Cyr, a monopolist of
wheat, a poisoner expert in the art of a Brinvilliers, a Gorgon, an
incendiary who sets fire to the château de Lunéville. And after she
has exhausted everything, she adds: "All the evil that has been said
of this diabolical woman is still below the truth." She applies to her
an old German proverb: "Where the devil can't go himself he sends an
old woman." Saint-Simon, inflamed as he is, pales beside this fabulous
hatred, and has himself told us the secret of it.
One day, on a memorable occasion, Madame found herself humiliated
before Mme. de Maintenon, forced to admit a wrong she had done her,
to make her excuses before witnesses, and to say she was gratefully
obliged to her. This happened on the death of Monsieur (June, 1701).
Madame, who at that serious crisis had everything to obtain from
the king both for herself and for her son (and did in fact obtain
it), made the effort to lay her dignity aside and address herself
to Mme. de Maintenon. The latter went to see her, and in presence
of the Duchesse de Ventadour as witness, she represented to Madame,
after listening to her, that the king had much reason to complain of
her, but was willing to overlook it all. Madame, believing herself
quite safe, protested her innocence; Mme. de Maintenon, with great
self-possession, allowed her to speak to the end, and then drew
from her pocket a letter, such as Madame wrote daily to her aunt
the Electress of Hanover, in which she spoke in the most outrageous
terms of the relations between the king and Mme. de Maintenon. We can
imagine that Madame, at the sight, nearly died upon the spot.
When the name of the king was laid aside Mme. de Maintenon began
to speak on her own account, and to answer Madame's reproaches for
having changed in her sentiments towards her. After allowing Madame,
as before, to say all that she had to say and to commit herself to
a certain extent, she suddenly quoted to her certain secret words
particularly offensive to herself, which she had known and kept on her
heart for ten years,--words that were said by Madame to a princess,
then dead, who had repeated them, word for word, to Mme. de Maintenon.
At the fall of this second thunderbolt Madame was turned into a
statue, and there was silence for some moments. Then followed tears,
cries, pardon, promises, and a reconciliation, which, being founded on
the cold triumph of Mme. de Maintenon and the inward humiliation of
Madame, could not of course last long.
It was soon after this scene and during the very short time that the
renewed friendship lasted that Madame wrote to Mme. de Maintenon the
following letter:--
Wednesday, June 15, 11 in the morning.
If I had not had fever and great agitation, Madame,
from the sad employment of yesterday, in opening the caskets
containing Monsieur's papers, scented with the most violent
perfumes, you would have heard from me earlier; but I can no
longer delay expressing to you how touched I am by the favours
that the king did yesterday to my son, and the manner in which
he has treated both him and myself; and as all this is the
result of your good counsels, Madame, be pleased to allow me to
express my sense of it, and to assure you that I shall keep,
very inviolably, the promise of friendship which I made to you;
I beg you to continue to me your counsels and advice, and not
to doubt a gratitude that can end only with my life.