I have just read a pleasing, sweet, simple, and even touching
narrative, which rests and elevates the mind,--a narrative which all
should read as I have done. It concerns, once more, Mme. de Maintenon;
but Mme. de Maintenon taken this time on her practical side, which
is least open to discussion, namely, her work and foundation of
Saint-Cyr. M. le duc de Noailles had already given a brief but
interesting account of it in his prelude to the "History of Madame de
Maintenon," but M. Théophile Lavallée has now published a complete and
connected "History of Saint-Cyr," which may be called definitive.
[Illustration: _Mme. de Maintenon_]
In studying the history of Mme. de Maintenon there has happened to
M. Lavallée what will happen to all sound but prejudiced minds (and
I sometimes meet with such) who will approach this distinguished
personage and take pains to know her in her habit of life. I will not
say that he is converted to her; that would be an ill-rendering of a
simply equitable impression received by an upright mind; but he has
brought justice to bear on that mass of fantastic and odiously vague
imputations which have long been in circulation as to the assumed
historical rôle of this celebrated woman. He sees her as she was,
wholly concerned for the salvation of the king, for his reform, his
decent amusement, for the interior life of the royal family, for
the relief of the people, and doing all this, it is true, with more
rectitude than enthusiasm, more precision than grandeur.
On the threshold of Saint-Cyr M. Lavallée has placed a portrait of
its illustrious founder in which lives again that grace of hers, so
real, so sober, so indefinable, which, liable as it is to disappear
in the distance, should not be overlooked when at times her image
seems to us too hard and cold. He borrows this portrait from a Dame
de Saint-Cyr whose pen, in its vivacity and colour, is worthy of a
Sévigné: "She had, at fifty years of age, a most agreeable tone of
voice, an affectionate air, an open, smiling forehead, natural gesture
with her beautiful hands, eyes of fire, and motions of an easy figure
so cordial, so harmonious, that she put into the shade the greatest
beauties of the Court.... At a first glance she seemed imposing, as if
veiled in severity; the smile and the voice dispersed the cloud."
Saint-Cyr, in its completed idea, was not only a girls' school, then a
convent for young ladies of rank, a good work and recreation for Mme.
de Maintenon; it was something more loftily conceived, a foundation
worthy in all respects of Louis XIV. and his epoch. Under Louis XIV.,
and especially during the second half of his reign, France, even
in times of peace, was compelled to maintain its imposing military
attitude and a powerful army of 150,000 men under arms. Louvois
introduced a system of modern organization into that great body;
though the essentially modern base, the regular and equal contribution
of all to military service, was still lacking. The nobility, which
was, and continued to be, the soul of war, found itself for the first
time subjected to strict rules and obligations which offended its
spirit and greatly aggravated its burdens. Consequently, royalty
contracted towards it fresh duties. Louis XIV. saw this, and had
the heart to meet his obligation,--first, by founding the Hôtel
des Invalides, a part of which was reserved for old or wounded
officers; secondly, by forming companies of Cadets, exercised at the
frontier forts, in which four thousand sons of nobles were brought
up; and thirdly (as soon as Mme. de Maintenon suggested to him the
idea), by the foundation of the royal house of Saint-Cyr, intended
for the education of two hundred and fifty noble but impoverished
young ladies. The establishment in the succeeding century of the
École Militaire, was the necessary complement of these monarchical
foundations; it added all that was insufficient in the companies of
Cadets.
The first thought of Saint-Cyr in Mme. de Maintenon's mind did not
rise to this height. Mme. de Maintenon was sincerely religious. She
was no sooner drawn from indigence by the bounty of the king than
she said in her own mind that she ought to shed something of that
bounty on others as poor as she herself had once been. This idea of
succouring poor young ladies and preserving them from dangers through
which she herself had passed was a very old and very natural thing in
her; she regarded it as a debt and an indemnity before God for her
great fortune. Her first step was to gather a number of young ladies,
for whose education she paid, at Montmorency, then at Rueil; at which
latter place she gave more development to her good intention. She
had always had a great taste for bringing up children, for teaching
them, reproving and reprimanding them; it was one of her particular
and prominent talents. From Rueil the Institution was transferred to
Noisy, where it continued to increase, Mme. de Maintenon devoting to
it every instant she could steal from the Court. She soon began to
congratulate herself on its success. "Fancy my pleasure," she writes
to her brother, "when I return along the avenue, followed by the
hundred and eighty-four young ladies who are here at the present time."
Mme. de Maintenon was made for this sort of internal domestic
government. She had the gift and the art of it; she enjoyed the
full pleasure of it. That is no reason why we should estimate her
merit to be less. Because she sought repose in action, delights in
authority and familiarity, and because her self-love (from which we
never part) found its satisfaction there, we should not the less
admire her. An ancient poet, Simonides of Amorgos, in a satire against
women, compares them for their dominant defects, when they are bad,
to various species of animals (those Ancients were not gallant), but
when he comes to a wise, useful, frugal, industrious, diligent, and
fruitful woman he compares her to the bee. Mme. de Maintenon, in the
bosom of this establishment of which she was the soul and the mother,
ruling the hive in every sense, may be likened to the indefatigable
bee. Such she had been all her life in the houses where she lived
on a footing of friendship; putting them into order, cleanliness,
decency, spreading a spirit of work about her, and at the same time
doing honour also to the spirit of society and courtesy. What must it
therefore have been in her own domain, her own foundation, in the hive
of her predilection, with all her joy and all her pride as queen-bee
and mother, having at last succeeded in producing the perfect ideal
that was in her?
That ideal was patriotic and Christian both. One day, in an interview,
the record of which was written down by her pious pupils, after
telling them how little premeditated and foreseen was her great
fortune at Court, she said with a transport and fire we should
scarcely expect of her, but which was in her whenever she dwelt on a
cherished topic:
"That is how it was with Saint-Cyr, which became insensibly what
you see it to-day. I have often told you that I do not like new
establishments; it is far better to support old ones. And yet, almost
without thinking of it, I have made a new one. Every one believes
that I, my head on my pillow, have planned this fine institution; but
it is not so. God has brought about Saint-Cyr by degrees. If I had
made a plan, I should have thought of the worries of execution, the
difficulties, the details. I should have feared them; I should have
said: 'All this is far beyond me;' courage would have failed me. Much
compassion for indigent nobility, because I have been orphaned and
poor myself, and knowledge of such a life, made me desire to assist it
in my lifetime. But, while planning to do the good I could, I never
dreamed of doing it after my death. That was a second thought, born of
the first. May this establishment last as long as France itself, and
France as long as the world! Nothing is dearer to me than my children
of Saint-Cyr; I love their very dust. I offer myself, and all my
attendants to serve them; I have no reluctance to be their servant if
my service will teach them to do without that of others. It is to this
I tend; this is my passion, this is my heart."
It was in the year of her marriage (1684) that she applied herself,
as an inward thank-offering towards Heaven, to perfect the attempt
at Noisy, and to give it that first royal character which it assumed
wholly after its removal to Saint-Cyr. She represented to the king,
after a visit he had made to Noisy which had pleased him much, that
"the greater part of the noble families of the kingdom were reduced to
a pitiable state, owing to the costs their heads had been forced to
incur in his service; that their children required support to prevent
them from falling into utter degradation; that it would be a work
worthy of his piety and greatness to make a settled establishment as
a refuge for poor young girls of rank throughout the kingdom, where
they could be brought-up piously to the duties of their condition."
Père de La Chaise approved the project; Louvois cried out at the
expense; Louis XIV. himself seemed to hesitate. "Never did Queen of
France," he said, "do anything like this." It was thus, and thus only,
that Mme. de Maintenon allowed herself to manifest her secret but
efficacious royalty.
The idea of the foundation of Saint-Cyr was accepted, and the king
spoke of it to the council of August 15, 1684. Two years went
by, during which the house was built [by Mansart at a cost of
1,200,000 francs], the endowments and revenues were settled, and the
Constitution was prepared. Letters-patent were delivered in June,
1686, and the Community was transferred from Noisy to the new domicile
between the 26th of July and the 1st of August. During the succeeding
six years it felt its way and made tentative essays; these were most
brilliant, and even glorious; never did Saint-Cyr make more noise in
the world than during this period before it was firmly seated on its
permanent and sure foundation.
Mme. de Maintenon had dreamed of an establishment like no other; where
all should go by rule without being bound by vows; where absolutely
nothing of the minutiæ and pettiness of convents should exist;
maintaining, nevertheless, at the same time purity and ignorance of
evil, while sharing, with prudence and Christian reserve, in the
charms of society and polished intercourse. Louis XIV., who saw
all things with a practical eye and in the interests of the State,
approved of Saint-Cyr having nothing monastic about it, and would fain
have kept it so. But precautions were needed in this first attempt
of Mme. de Maintenon to mingle substantial qualities, reason, and
charm, which she found it impossible to maintain; to do so all the
mistresses and all the pupils needed a wisdom and strength equal
to her own. To bring up young ladies in a "Christian, reasonable,
and noble manner" was her object; but a danger soon appeared that
_nobleness_ would lead to contempt of humility, and reasonableness to
a spirit of reasoning.
It was during these tentative years, while Saint-Cyr was trying its
wings and working out its apprenticeship, that Mme. de Maintenon
requested Racine to compose the sacred comedies that were there
performed. If "Esther," with the worldly consequences and the
introduction of the élite of profane society that then ensued,
proved a distraction and perhaps an imprudence and fault in Mme. de
Maintenon's management of the first Saint-Cyr, we feel that we ought
not to cavil, and no one in the world can really blame her. "Esther"
has remained, in the eyes of all, the crown of that establishment.
The details of the composition of that adorable play and its
representation are too well known to need repetition; they form one
of the most graceful and assuredly the most original episodes of our
dramatic literature. Nevertheless, Mme. de La Fayette, like a sensible
woman, and one a little jealous, perhaps, of Mme. de Maintenon, found
it a pretext to say:--
"Mme. de Maintenon, who is the foundress of Saint-Cyr,
always busy with the purpose of amusing the king, is constantly
introducing some novelty among the little girls brought up in
that establishment, of which it may be said that it is worthy
of the grandeur of the king and of the mind of her who invented
and who conducts it. But sometimes the best-invented things
degenerate considerably; and that establishment which, now
that we have become devout, is the abode of virtue and piety,
may some day, without any profound prophesying, be that of
debauchery and impiety. For to believe that three hundred young
girls can live there until they are twenty years old with a
Court full of eager young men at their very doors, especially
when the authority of the king will no longer restrain
them,--to believe, I say, that young women and young men can
be so near to each other without jumping the walls is scarcely
reasonable."
It became necessary, after the success of "Esther," and the
instigation given to the Court, to make a step backward and return
to the spirit of the foundation, fortifying it by more severe
regulations. The danger of the neighbourhood of Saint-Cyr to
Versailles was indeed great; it was of the utmost consequence that
Mme. de La Fayette's prophecy should not be fulfilled, and that the
young ladies of Saint-Cyr should in no wise resemble those of M.
Alexandre Dumas. The lesson that Mme. de Maintenon drew from the
representations of "Esther," and the invasion of the profane was
henceforth to say and resay ceaselessly to her teachers: "Hide your
pupils; do not let them be seen."
From the passage of Racine through Saint-Cyr, and that of Fénelon,
there resulted (from the point of view of the foundation and its
object) a number of unsuitable things in the midst of their graces.
Fénelon developed a taste for refined and subtile piety suited only
for choice souls; Racine, without intending it, created a taste
for reading, poesy, and all such things, the perfume of which is
sweet, but the fruit not always salutary. Mme. de Maintenon, however
influenced she might herself be by these tastes, recognized with her
natural good sense the necessity of finding a remedy, and of not
allowing those young and tender spirits, some of whom were already
taken with the new ideas, to go farther in that direction. Among the
first pupils and mistresses of Saint-Cyr was a certain Mme. de La
Maisonfort, a distinguished woman, with an inquiring spirit, fond of
investigating, and made for quite another career than that which she
had chosen. She could not bring herself to renounce the gratifications
of her mind and taste or the sensitiveness of her feelings. Mme. de
Maintenon made war upon them in a number of very fine letters, which
did not convince her. "How will you bear," she writes to her, "the
crosses that God will send you in the course of your life if a Norman
or a Picard accent hinders you, or a man disgusts you because he is
not as sublime as Racine? The latter, poor man, would have edified
you could you have seen his humility during his illness, and his
repentance for his search after intellect. He did not ask at such a
time for a fashionable confessor; he saw none but a worthy priest
of his own parish." That example of the dying Racine did not work
successfully. Mme. de La Maisonfort was one of those rare persons
whom we see from time to time soaring to the summit of all the
investigations of their epoch, supreme and refined judges of works
of intellect, oracles and proselytes of the opinions in vogue. She
could play charmingly at Jansenism with Racine and M. de Troisville,
and distil Quietism with Fénelon, as in the eighteenth century she
might have fallen in love with David Hume in company with the Comtesse
de Boufflers, or in the nineteenth she would surely have shone in a
_doctrinaire_ salon discussing psychology and æstheticism, perhaps
even going so far as the Fathers of the Church, not without adverting,
as she passed, to socialism. Mme. de La Maisonfort, much as she was
liked by Mme. de Maintenon, was, necessarily, dismissed from the
Institute of Saint-Cyr.
Another mind, much better and much safer, that of Mme. de Glapion, was
slightly affected by the new doctrines. "I have perceived," Mme. de
Maintenon writes to her, "the disgust you feel for your confessors;
you think them vulgar; you want more brilliancy and delicacy; you wish
to go to heaven by none but flowery paths." Mme. de Glapion thought
the Catechism rather grovelling and a little wanting in certain ways;
it seemed to her ridiculous "that the master should put questions
worthy of a scholar, and that the scholar should make the answers
of a master." She wished the question to be put by the child, who,
after receiving the answer, should reason upon it and so be led from
one investigation to another. Mme. de Glapion wished, as we see, to
introduce the method of Descartes into theology. Mme. de Maintenon
did not discuss the point; but she held up custom, experience, the
impossibility of not stammering in such matters. "All those ideas,"
she wrote to Mme. de Glapion, "are the remains of vanity. You do not
like things common to all the world; your own mind is lofty, and you
wish everything to be as lofty. Vain desire! The most learned theology
cannot tell you more about the Trinity than you find in the Catechism.
What you think and feel beyond that is a matter to be sacrificed; your
spirit must become as simple as your heart. Employ your mind, not in
multiplying your disgusts, but in conquering them, in concealing them
until they are conquered, and in making yourself like the pleasures of
your condition." Mme. de Glapion succeeded in doing so. She was the
consolation of Mme. de Maintenon and her truest inheritor; together
with Madame du Pérou, she maintained at Saint-Cyr that spirit of
precision and regularity combined with suavity and noble manners which
distinguished the foundress, until long after the latter's death.
It may be said, definitively, that the persons of the generation
at Saint-Cyr who had known and enjoyed Racine and Fénelon, and who
remembered all of which they were cured, could alone realize the
perfection of the education, the grace, and the language of Saint-Cyr;
after them the essential virtues and the rules were kept, but the
charm had flown, perhaps we may even say the life.
During these years of labour and tentative effort Mme. de Maintenon
never ceased to visit, inspire, and correct Saint-Cyr; she went there
once in every two days at least, remaining whole days whenever she
could. She took part in the classes, in the exercises, in the smallest
details of the establishment, thinking nothing beneath her. "I have
often seen her," says one of the modest historians quoted by M.
Lavallée, "arrive before six in the morning in order to be present at
the rising of the young ladies, and follow them throughout their whole
day in the capacity of first instructress, in order to judge properly
of what should be done and regulated. She helped to comb and dress the
little ones. Often she gave two or three consecutive months to one
class, observing the order of the day, talking to the class in general
and to each member in private; reproving one, encouraging another,
giving to all the means of correcting themselves. She had much grace
in speaking, as in all else that she did. Her talks were lively,
simple, natural, intelligent, insinuating, persuasive. I should never
finish if I tried to relate all the good she did to the classes in
those happy days." Those "happy days," that golden age, was the period
of the start, the beginning, when all was not yet reduced to a code,
when a certain liberty of inexperience was mingled with the early
freshness of virtue.
Nevertheless, under the wise direction of the Bishop of Chartres,
Mme. de Maintenon felt the necessity of giving to her enterprise less
peculiarity than she had at first intended. It was decided that the
"Dames institutrices," while remaining true to the special object of
their trust, should be regular nuns under solemn vows. Warned by the
first irregularities and the fancies that she saw were dawning, she
busied herself in making a rampart for her girls of their Constitution
and rules. She understood, like all great founders, that we can
draw from human nature a particular and extraordinary strength in
one direction only by suppressing, or at least repressing, in all
others. This final reform, this transformation of Saint-Cyr from a
secular house into a regular nunnery, was completed between the years
1692 and 1694. The grave nature of Mme. de Maintenon is imprinted on
every line of the little book addressed to the "Dames" and entitled
"The Spirit of the Institute of the Daughters of Saint-Louis." The
first suggestion made to them is in terms as absolute as can well be
imagined; nothing is ever to be changed or modified in their rule
under any pretext whatsoever; solidity, stability, immovability is
the vow and the command of Mme. de Maintenon--and the Institute
remained faithful thereto to its last hour. The Institution was not
founded, says the book, for prayer, but for action, for the _education
of young ladies_; that is its true austerity; that is, as it were,
the perpetual prayer, which needs only to be fed by other rapid and
short prayers repeated often in the depths of the heart. "A mixture
of prayer and action," such was the spirit of the Institute. Mme. de
Maintenon endeavours to forearm her girls against the perils they
have already encountered. "Have neither fancy nor curiosity to seek
for extraordinary reading and _ragouts d'oraison_." "There is a great
difference between knowing God through learning, by the _point of the
mind_, by the subtlety of reason, by the multiplicity of studies, and
knowing Him through the simple instructions of Christianity." Between
those lines I seem to read, "Above all, not much Racine and no more
Fénelon."
Truly, it was a high idea that the Dames de Saint-Louis were destined
to bring up young ladies to be mothers of families and to take part
in the good education of their children, thus placing in their hands
a portion of the future of France and of religion. "There is," says
Mme. de Maintenon, "in this work of Saint-Louis, if properly done in a
spirit of true faith and a real love of God, the wherewithal to renew
throughout this kingdom the perfection of Christianity."
The foundress reminds them in so many words that, being at the gates
of Versailles as they are, there is no medium for them between a
very strict or a very scandalous establishment. "Make your parlours
inaccessible to all superfluous visits. Do not fear to seem a little
stern, but do not be haughty." She counsels a more absolute humility
than she is able to obtain. "Reject the name of Dames [ladies] and
take pleasure in calling yourselves the Daughters of Saint-Louis."
She particularly insists on this virtue of humility, which is always
the weak side of the Institution. "You will preserve yourselves only
by humility. You must expiate what there is of human grandeur in
your foundation." Recognizing these conditions of society, Mme. de
Maintenon gives this advice to a young girl leaving Saint-Cyr for
the world: "Never appear without the body of your gown (meaning in
dishabille), and flee from all the other excesses common even to girls
in the present day, such as too much eating, tobacco, hot liquors, too
much wine, etc.; we have enough real needs without inventing others so
useless and dangerous."
In presence of a world that she knew so well, we must not think
that Mme. de Maintenon tried to make tender plants, fragile women,
ingenuously ignorant, with the morality of novices; she had, beyond
all other persons, a profound sense of reality. She desired her
"Dames" to speak boldly to their pupils on the marriage state; to
show them the world and its divers conditions such as they are. "Most
nuns," she said, "dare not utter the word 'marriage.' Saint Paul had
no such false delicacy, for he speaks of it very openly." She was
the first to speak of it as an honourable, necessary, and hazardous
state. "When your young ladies have entered marriage they will find it
is not a thing to laugh about. You should accustom them to speak of
it seriously, even sadly, in a Christian manner; for it is the state
in which we have most tribulations, even in the best marriage; they
should be shown that three-fourths of all marriages are unhappy." As
for celibacy, to which too many young girls might be condemned on
leaving the Institution, for lack of a dowry ("my greatest need," she
says jestingly, "is of sons-in-law"), she thinks it an equally sad
state. In general, no one has ever had fewer illusions than Mme. de
Maintenon. Speaking of men, she thinks them rough and hard, "little
tender in their love when passion ceases to have sway." As for women,
she has very fixed views of them, which are but moderately flattering.
"Women," she says, "only half know things, but the little they do know
makes them usually conceited, disdainful, loquacious, and scornful of
solid information." The education of Saint-Cyr, after its reform, had
it always been carried out in Mme. de Maintenon's true spirit, would
not have sinned through too much timidity, weakness, and tender grace;
its austerity was only veiled.
The reform once established at Saint-Cyr and the first sad impression
effaced, all became orderly, and joy returned as before to a life so
uniform and busy. Mme. de Maintenon had, as I have said, the gift of
education, and she would have no sadness about it; there never can
be sadness in what is done thoroughly with a full heart in the right
way; at one moment or at another, joy, which is but the expansion
of the soul, returns and cannot cease to flow through actions. Mme.
de Maintenon relied greatly on recreations to form her pupils
pleasantly, to show them their defects and win their confidence
without seeming to be in search of it. In the good she felt she had
done at Saint-Cyr she dwelt much on the pains she had bestowed on
"recreation." "That," she said, "is what leads to union and removes
partialities; that is what binds the mistresses with the pupils; a
superior makes herself liked and warms the hearts of her girls by
giving them pleasures; that is the time when edifying things can
be said without repelling, because we can mingle them with gayety;
_many good maxims can be thrown out in jest_." She requires from the
mistresses she has trained a talent for recreation as well as for
teaching. "Make your recreations gay and free, and your girls will
come to them."
Louis XIV. at Saint-Cyr appears full of charm, of nobleness always,
and sometimes with a certain _bonhomie_ which he showed nowhere else.
Under great events he intervened as king; when it was judged proper
to reform the Constitution, he re-read it and approved it with his
signature; when it becomes necessary to dismiss the recalcitrant
mistresses, such as Mme. de La Maisonfort and some others, and to use
for the purpose _lettres de cachet_, he, knowing that the heart of
the other mistresses is wrung by this exile of their sisters, writes
from the Camp at Compiègne to explain his rigour, and goes himself
with a full cortège to the hall of the Community, where he holds a
sort of _lit de justice_ both regal and paternal. On his return from
hunting he frequently came to find Mme. de Maintenon in this place of
retreat, but never without taking time to put on, as he said, "out of
respect to these ladies, a decent coat." During the wars he remembers
that he has at Saint-Cyr, in those young daughters of Saint-Louis
and of the race of heroes, "warrior spirits, religious souls, good
Frenchwomen;" and he asks for their prayers on days of disaster as
on those of victory. He knows that they mourn with him, and that
his glory is their joy. All this new and private side of Louis XIV.
is very delicately and generously touched by M. Lavallée; at certain
passages we are surprised to find ourselves as much touched as the
great monarch himself.
Louis XIV. and Mme. de Maintenon believed in the efficacy of prayer,
especially that of Saint-Cyr. "Make yourselves saints," says the
foundress to her daughters repeatedly throughout the long series of
calamitous wars,--"make yourselves saints in order to gain us peace."
And towards the end, when a ray of victory returned, she mingles a
sort of gayety with the solemnity of her hope. "It would be shameful
in our Superior," she writes, "if she could not raise the siege of
Landrecies by force of prayers: it is for great souls to do great
things."
During the last years of Louis XIV. Mme. de Maintenon was happy only
when she could go to Saint-Cyr, "to hide and comfort herself." She
said it again and again, under all forms and in all tones: "My great
consoler is Saint-Cyr."--"Vive Saint-Cyr! in spite of its defects
one is better here than elsewhere in all the world." She had tasted
of all and was surfeited of all. In spite of her dazzling position,
and at the very summit, apparently, she was one of those delicate
natures that are more sensitive to the secret animosities of the
world than to its grosser offerings. Surrounded at Versailles by men
who did not like her and by women she despised, reading their hearts
through their self-interested homage and cringing baseness, worn-out
with fatigue and constraint in presence of the king and the royal
family, who used and abused her, she went to Saint-Cyr to relax, to
moan, to let fall the mask that she wore perpetually. There she was
respected, cherished, and obeyed; when absent, her letters read at
recreation were the pride of the one who had received them and the
joy of all; when present, the mistresses and pupils concerted together
to awaken her souvenirs and induce her to tell of her beginnings and
the singular incidents of her fortune,--in short, to make her talk of
herself; that topic to all of us so restful and so sweet. "We love to
talk of ourselves," she remarked, "were it even to say harm." But she
never said harm.
If it is painful, as she said in after years, to last too long, to
live in a society of persons who do not know us or the life that
we have led in former days, who are, in short, of another epoch,
it is nevertheless very pleasant to retreat to a garden bench and
find ourselves surrounded by fresh young souls, docile in letting
themselves be trained, and eager for all that we will say to them.
Do not let us analyze too closely the various sentiments of Mme. de
Maintenon at Saint-Cyr; suffice it to say that the effect on all who
surrounded her was fruitful and good.
The language of Saint-Cyr has a tone apart amid that period of Louis
XIV.; Mme. de Caylus was the mundane flower of it. We feel that
"Esther" has passed that way, and Fénelon equally. The diction is that
of Racine in prose, of Massillon, shorter and more sober,--a school,
in fact, all pure, precise, and perfect (to which belonged the Duc du
Maine); a charming source, more sparkling on the side of the women,
though rather less fertile. At first it promised greater things;
and to one of the Dames de Saint-Louis (Mme. de Chapigny) Mme. de
Maintenon was able to write: "I have never read anything so good, so
charming, so clear, so well arranged, so eloquent, so regulated, in a
word, so wonderful as your letter."
At the death of Louis XIV. and under the harsh contrast with times
so changed, Saint-Cyr passed, almost in an instant, to a state of
antiquity and royal relic. After Mme. de Maintenon's death worthy
inheritors of her rule continued to maintain for a long time the
culture of suavity and intelligence; but the Dames de Saint-Louis
were faithful, above all, to the intention of their foundress in
never making themselves talked of. Respected by all, little liked
by Louis XV., who thought them, as was natural, too lofty and too
worthy of honour, they vanish from sight in the continuance of duty
and the uniformity of their quiet existence. A letter of Horace
Walpole, who visits them as an antiquary, another from the Chevalier
de Boufflers, are the only noticeable testimony that we have about
them in the course of many years. When the revolution of '89 broke
out, the astonishment in that valley so close to Versailles was great,
much greater than elsewhere. Saint-Cyr had made itself so completely
_immobile_ in its past that it fell abruptly from Mme. de Maintenon to
Mirabeau.
From that time, after the abolition of the titles of nobility, there
seemed no uncertainty except as to the precise day on which the
Institution should perish. Nevertheless, the Dames de Saint-Louis
made a long and placid resistance, which maintained them in their
House till 1793; they accomplished and verified to the letter Mme. de
Maintenon's unconscious prediction when she said: "Your institution
can never fail so long as there is a king in France." It perished on
the morrow of the day when there was no king.
But see and wonder at the linking of fates: Among the young ladies
who were being educated at Saint-Cyr at that date was Marie-Anne de
Buonaparte, born at Ajaccio, January 3, 1771, and received at the
Institution in June, 1784. Her brother Napoléon de Buonaparte, an
officer of artillery, observing that after August 10 the decrees of
the Legislative Assembly seemed to announce, or rather to confirm, the
ruin of the house, went to that house on the morning of September 1,
1792, and took such active steps towards the mayor of the village and
the administrators of Versailles that he was enabled on the same day
to take away his sister (of whom he was the guardian) and carry her
to his family in Corsica. He was destined not to return to Saint-Cyr,
converted by him into a French Prytaneum, until June 28, 1805, when as
Emperor and master of all France he gazed--an equal to an equal--on
Louis XIV.
In 1793 the devastated Saint-Cyr lost for a time its very name, and
the ruined village was called Val-Libre. In 1794, while persons were
converting the church into a hospital, the tomb of Mme. de Maintenon
was discovered in the choir, broken open, the coffin violated, and her
remains insulted. On that day, at least, she was treated as a queen.
* * * * *
[Mme. de Maintenon was a voluminous letter-writer; many hundreds of
her letters are published, the most interesting of which are those to
the Princesse des Ursins. Her style is simple, easy, and dignified;
not graphic nor lifelike; she seems too rounded into her own mind
and views to be a good general observer; nor is she guided in her
judgment of others by a perception of their feelings, unless they are
reflected by her own. This remark does not apply to the Saint-Cyr
letters; in those she is genuine, she is writing on a topic that
fills her heart and opens it to others. Saint-Cyr was an episode in
Mme. de Maintenon's life, and as such it can be placed here with
some completeness. The last chapter of this volume contains a few
miscellaneous letters bearing more especially upon the character and
career of the Duchesse de Bourgogne, which Sainte-Beuve asserts can
only be truly known through the letters of Mme. de Maintenon to the
Princesse des Ursins.
The pupils of Saint-Cyr were divided into four classes named and
distinguished by the colour of their ribbons. Class Red (the youngest)
were from seven to ten years of age; class Green from ten to fourteen;
class Yellow from fourteen to seventeen; class Blue from seventeen
to twenty. Certain young ladies of class Blue were detailed as head
monitors and wore black ribbons; other monitors selected from classes
Blue and Yellow wore flame-coloured ribbons. The classes were divided
into bands or "families" of ten. Each class had a head mistress
and three sub-mistresses; there were also two mistresses for the
postulants or novices, two for the infirmary, others for the various
departments of the house, and a mistress-general for the whole school.
These mistresses were called "Dames de Saint-Louis" and were under
vows; they were recruited by postulants selected from class Blue; the
Superior was chosen by election among themselves from their own body.
Mme. de Brinon, the first Superior, who came with the school from
Rueil and Noisy, was an Ursuline nun.
After Mme. de Brinon, the Dames de Saint-Louis who were most relied
upon by Mme. de Maintenon were: Mme. du Pérou, mistress of the novices
at twenty years of age, afterwards elected many times as Superior;
Mme. de Fontaines, mistress-general, also frequently elected Superior;
and Mme. de Glapion, called the "Pearl of Saint-Cyr," who seems to
have been Mme. de Maintenon's most trusted friend, to whom she made
personal confidences. Many letters and "talks" addressed to these
ladies and others at Saint-Cyr have been published, from which those
that here follow are selected.]