Sainte-Beuve, in his essay on Madame, suggested to the French editor
of her letters that he should make a more complete collection of
them. M. Brunet professes to have done so in the edition from which
this translation is selected.[2] But when examined the additions
prove very insignificant, and the arrangement, though apparently more
chronological, interferes with the interest of the reader. Passages
which seem to belong together are cut up into sentences and scattered
singly over weeks and months; so that the point of Madame's racy
representations is often weakened. In this translation parts of the
letters of each year on a given topic are put together, so as to offer
a better picture of Madame's thought; as for her nature, she gives
that herself, and no one can better the portrait.
Nothing need be added to Sainte-Beuve's admirable essay beyond a brief
account of Madame's parentage, family relations, and the history, such
as it is, of her correspondence.
She was born at Heidelberg in 1652. Soon after her birth, her father,
Charles-Louis, Elector Palatine, parted from his wife, Charlotte of
Hesse-Cassel, and the little daughter, Élisabeth-Charlotte, was given
to the care of her father's sister, Sophia, Electress of Hanover
(mother of George I. of England); with whom she remained until her
marriage, against her wishes, in 1671, to Monsieur, brother of Louis
XIV., after the death of his first wife, Henrietta, daughter of
Charles I. of England. The marriage was political,--Louis XIV. seeking
to acquire rights in the Palatinate, and subsequently in Bavaria.
The father of Élisabeth-Charlotte, after parting from his wife,
married morganatically Louise de Degenfeld, by whom he had five
sons and three daughters,--these children being of course excluded
from the succession. Madame, in her ill-assorted and personally
mortifying marriage, of which she bravely strove to make the best,
found all her comfort in writing letters, a very small portion of
which have been preserved. All those addressed during her married
life to her beloved aunt, the Electress of Hanover, have disappeared,
probably destroyed by the judicious aunt herself, for Madame alludes
to them as containing secrets she did not write to others. Among
the many personages to whom she wrote habitually were: Duke Antoine
Ulrich of Brunswick; her two unmarried half-sisters, Louise and
Amélie, Countesses Palatine; her step-daughters, to whom she was
warmly attached, Marie-Louise, wife of Charles II., King of Spain,
and Anne-Marie, wife of Victor-Amadeus, Duke of Savoie and King
of Sardinia and Sicily (the mother of Marie-Adélaïde, Duchesse de
Bourgogne); and her own daughter, the Duchesse de Lorraine. Besides
these, she had a number of correspondents on the other side of the
Rhine, such as her cousins the Queen of Prussia and the Duchess of
Modena; her old governess in Hanover; Leibnitz in Leipzig; also the
Princess of Wales, Wilhelmina-Caroline of Brandebourg-Anspach, in
London.
Of these letters (scarcely any remaining extant except those to
her half-sisters) fragments first appeared at Stuttgard in 1789,
subsequently in Paris, in 1807, 1823, 1832. In 1843 the first edition
in a volume was published at Stuttgard by M. Wolfgang Menzel, a
translation of which by M. Brunet appeared in Paris in 1853. That
translation was made from the German volume, the original letters
having disappeared in a conflagration. A subsequent edition, with a
few insignificant additions as mentioned above, appeared a few years
later, from the last issue of which the present translation has been
selected.
M. Brunet remarks in his preface, that "Madame had the habit of
reproducing almost in the same terms the details which she gave of
the same events to diverse persons. She wrote with extreme rapidity,
passing, without any transition, from one subject to another, piling
up useless words and insignificant particulars which it would be quite
absurd to try to reproduce. Expressions of regret at the deaths or the
illnesses of Madame's numerous relatives, interminable protestations
of friendship, wearisome repetitions, swelled beyond all measure the
letters that came into the hands of M. Menzel, who cut off two-thirds
of them, preserving such parts only as had a more or less general
interest and an historical value."
The following letters are almost exclusively addressed to her
half-sisters, and chiefly to the Comtesse Louise, the Comtesse Amélie
having died in 1709. The names of her correspondents do not precede
the letters in the French edition, except in a few instances.
Madame needs no interpreter, for even her vituperative faculty conveys
its own correction; her hatred to Mme. de Maintenon becomes amusing,
and we are quite able to see the justice and the injustice of it. Her
favourite term for her enemy is, however, so outrageous (_la vieille
guenipe_, the old slut, or any such equivalent--once she descends to
saying _la vieille truie_) that it is more agreeable to the reader to
keep the word in French than to constantly repeat it in English.
Madame died on the 8th of December, 1722, at the age of seventy, just
one year before the death of her son, the regent. She was buried in
Saint-Denis, and Massillon pronounced her funeral oration.
* * * * *
The letters of Adélaïde de Savoie, Duchesse de Bourgogne and dauphine,
are of little value, as the reader will see, if judged historically,
or as a document on the manners and customs of a period. They are
placed here as a contemporary record of a tender and pathetic young
life on its passage, through frivolity and ill-health, to a premature
death just as age had corrected her defects, and the prospect of
being, with her husband, the blessing and salvation of France was
dawning before her.
* * * * *
Sainte-Beuve possessed a natural spirit of justice which led him
(though it did not invariably rule him) to satisfy his literary
conscience by returning to the portraits of his personages to correct,
modify, and balance his first impressions. It is in this spirit that
his picture of Mme. de Maintenon and Saint-Cyr, followed by a number
of her own letters and papers on that section of her life, are given
here to succeed the prejudiced statements of her two greatest enemies,
Saint-Simon and Madame. The picture of Saint-Cyr stands apart in Mme.
de Maintenon's career in a frame of its own; it shows her at her very
best and as she herself would fain appear to posterity. It is the
other extreme of the portraiture, and the reader must form his own
judgment as to how the full truth of the nature and conduct of this
remarkable woman can be evolved.