The Melancholy King—The Portents of the Storm—The Ambition of
Madame Louis Quatorze—The Farrier of Provence—The Ghost in
the Wood—Ninon’s Objection—The King’s Conscience—A Dreary
Court—Racine’s Slip of the Tongue—The Passing of a Great Poet,
and a Busy Pen Laid Down.
The disastrous thrall holding Louis XIV. to Madame de Maintenon, was
an endless theme of wonder and speculation among his subjects. Very
few of them ascribed it to pure unadulterated love and affection
for his old wife—for she was his elder by three years—while Louis
himself was now at an age when the enthusiasm of life slows into some
weariness and languor as it recognises the emptiness and futility of
all mundane things. There were times when he was lost in brooding
thought, and he would wander about his splendid galleries and salons
and magnificent gardens, absorbed, if his dull aspect expressed the
inward spirit, in melancholy reflection. The glory had departed
of his earlier ruling, leaving the nation loaded with debt. The
price had to be paid for those brilliant victories of long ago, and
accumulation of debt on the many later reverses cried for settlement.
The provinces had been deeply impoverished by the absenteeism of
their overlords, whose presence the Grand Monarque had for so
many years required to grace Versailles, attired in their silks
and velvets, sweeping their plumed, diamond-aigretted hats to the
polished floors, bowing and crowding to gaze at the sublime process
of His Majesty’s getting up, promenading with the great ladies among
the fountains and bosquets of Trianon, spending the heaven-bestowed
hours in the sweetness of doing nothing but manipulate their
rapier-hangers and snuff-boxes; while Jacques Bonhomme, away down in
Touraine and Perigord and Berri, and where you will in the length
and breadth of fair France, was sweating and starving to keep those
high-born gentlemen supplied with money in their purses for the
card-tables, and to maintain their lackeys and gilded coaches in
the sumptuous style which was no more than Louis required of the
vast throng. It was in its way an unavoidable exaction, since the
few of the nobility who remained on their own estates had done so
at the peril of incurring the severe displeasure of the king, the
Sun-King—_Le roi le veut_—whose centre was Versailles.
And still the full time was not yet when all this should be changed.
Even for Louis, the absolute reckoning day was but shadowing in.
“After us the deluge”: that prophetic utterance was spoken long after
Louis was borne to his rest in St Dénis, but when the records of his
life tell of those long-brooding, silent pacings amid the grandeur
and treasures of his splendid palace, comes the question if from afar
off there did not sound the murmur of the flood that was to break
some hundred years hence, if in some dim yet certain way the cloud
no bigger than a man’s hand was not apparent to his introspective
gaze, for as yet the domestic misfortunes of his latest years had
not befallen, death had not robbed him of his heir, and the rest dear
to him; but discontent, not unmingled with contempt, seethed round
the proud King of France. How were the mighty fallen, and how great
the political mistake which indissolubly linked the ambitious woman,
clothed about in her new-found meretricious garb of piety, with his
great responsible destiny—Louis, Dieudonné and elect ruler.
Nor did it stop at the secret, sufficiently open and acknowledged, of
his marriage with Scarron’s widow. The fear was well enough founded
that she was moving earth, and if possible all heaven, to be Queen
of France; but righteousness had small part in the endeavour, and
trickery and chicanery failed to prevail to this crowning end upon
the king’s consciousness and conviction. Pride, and the sense of his
irrevocable bondage, mingled with the poison of the hypocritical
devoutness instilled into him by his wife and her confessor, kept him
silently deferential to this woman, spoiled by prosperity; but she
herself says that all her endeavours to amuse him or bring a smile to
his lips, failed. He had—mildly construing the homely proverb—put
off from shore with a person—more or less mentionable—and he was
bound to sail to land with her.
The _diablerie_ at work was untiring, and had many strings, and there
seem, small, if any, question that to the genius of the Marseilles
merchant’s wife, formerly Madame Arnoul, the curious tale of the
Farrier of Provence is due.
From extreme southward of France came this poor man, who said he was
shoemaker to all the horses of his grace, Monsieur d’Épernon, at his
country mansion near Marseilles—to speak to the king’s Majesty upon
a subject concerning him alone.
The major of the guards to whom he explained his wish, told him such
an interview was impossible. A letter of audience was first required,
and that was to be had only with utmost difficulty. Besides, he
added, the king did not receive all the world. The man objected that
he was not all the world. “Quite so,” said the guard. “By whom are
you sent?”
“By Heaven.”
“Ah!”—and all the bodyguard went into fits of laughter at this
reply. The man stoutly insisted, however, that he had most important
matters to disclose to “the Master of ‘Vesàilles,’” as he phrased
it. At this point of the conversation, the Marshal de Torcy,
Colbert’s nephew, happened to come by. Overhearing what had passed,
he directed that this emissary of Heaven should be conducted to the
ministers, just then sitting in council. They, impressed with the
honest and earnest air of the farrier, informed the king of the
affair. Listening with grave attention to their representation, Louis
commanded the man to be brought before him. Alone with the king, the
farrier unfolded his tale. It was fantastic enough. He was returning,
he said, from the duke’s stables, where he had been shoeing some
of the horses—to his own home, in a hamlet situated not far off,
and was passing through a wood. It was night, and quite dark; but
suddenly he found himself enfolded in a brilliant light, and in the
midst of it stood a tall woman, right in his path. She addressed him
by his name, and bade him repair immediately and without an instant
of delay to Versailles, where he was to tell the king that he had
seen the spirit of the dead queen, his wife, and that she, the ghost
of Maria Théresa, commanded him in the name of heaven, to make public
the marriage he had contracted, which hitherto he had kept secret.
The king objected that the man had probably been the victim of
hallucination. “I thought so too at first,” replied the farrier,
“and I sat down under an elm-tree to collect myself, believing I had
been dreaming; but two days afterwards, as I was passing the same
spot, I again saw the phantom, who threatened all sorts of terrible
misfortunes to me and mine if I did not immediately do what it had
directed.”
Then the king had another doubt; and asked him whether he was not
trying to impose upon him, and had been paid to carry out the affair.
The man replied that in order for His Majesty to be convinced that
he was no impostor, he should wish him to reply to one question he
had to ask. “Have you,” he went on, when the king willingly consented
to this, “have you ever mentioned to living soul a syllable about
the midnight visit the late queen-mother paid you in the Château de
Ribeauvillé years ago?”
“No,” said Louis, with paling lips, “I never confided it to anyone.”
“Very well; the ghost in the forest bade me remind you of that visit,
if you expressed any doubt of my good faith; and,” added the man, as
the king said it was very strange, “before disappearing, the tall
white woman uttered these words—‘He must obey me now, as he then
obeyed his mother.’”
The king, in an access of dismay and perplexity, sent for the Duc de
Duras, and related to him in confidence what had passed during the
interview with the peasant. The duke, who was an intimate friend of
Ninon, told her the wondrous tale.
It took no time for her to arrive at the conclusion that Madame Louis
Quatorze and her faithful card-divining friend and fortune-teller,
Madame Arnoul, were at the bottom of the business, and under promise
on the duke’s part of inviolable secrecy, she told him of the
adventure in the Vosges and the very conspicuous part she had played
in it, actuated by her enmity towards de Montespan. The farrier, she
did not doubt, was honest enough; but, simple and credulous, he had
been made the tool of the two women—an easy prey to Madame Arnoul,
who, living at Marseilles, had seen him, and reckoned him up as
suitable for her design.
The duke was of opinion that there was no doubt Ninon’s solution of
the mystery was correct, and he added that, this being the case, it
was her duty to inform the king of it—“For who knows,” said Duras,
“that he may not be weak enough to obey the ghost’s behests, and
disgrace himself and his throne in the eye of all Europe and the
universe, by seating the Maintenon upon it.” It was a most serious
matter—most serious.
Ninon, however, shrank from the suggestion. She was a woman of
courage; but recent experience had taught her the lengths of malice
to which her old friend Françoise could go, and she had no mind to
measure weapons with her again. To make clean confession of the
affair to the king, was simply to bring down upon herself all the
thunderbolts of the hatred of the woman whose ingenuity was never at
fault in plausibility, and the finding the way to retain the kings
good graces at no matter what cost to anyone.
Ninon saw a far better plan than sacrificing herself for the
destruction of the scheme. She begged the duke not to compromise her
to the king; but to represent to him the advisability of sending
competent and trusted persons to the Ribeauvillé château, accompanied
by the duke himself, and there to sound and search the recesses and
panelling of the haunted room and the adjacent one she indicated, and
little more would be necessary to prove to His Majesty that he had
been duped.
The journey taken, and the search made, the emissaries duly returned.
Their report fully satisfied the king that he had been victimised, by
some person or persons unknown, in the gloomy old mansion—and his
marriage with Madame de Maintenon was not then or ever publicly and
officially proclaimed. If he had any suspicions of her complicity,
he made no sign of them; either he thought her incapable of using
such base means of attaining the desired end, or, on the other hand,
he was indulgent to the not unnatural desire to see published the
fact of the honour he had bestowed on her. At all events, calm and
serene, outwardly dignified, unruffled, Madame Louis Quatorze dwelt
on at Versailles, in the odour of all the sanctimoniousness and
decorum the coming of herself and of Père la Chaise had imparted to
the vast place.
Well endowed personally and mentally, and amiably disposed, Louis was
admirably fitted by nature to represent the beloved and worshipped
king who had maintained the spiritual liberties of his Protestant
subjects, when he himself became a Catholic—since, as he had said,
“_Paris vaut une Messe_.” But though his naturally grand deportment
and the conviction of his own semi-divinity and sense of great-doing
had wrought Louis to brilliant achievements for the State, apart
from the glories of the battlefield, it is more than conceivable
that he was fully conscious of his own inadequate education and
rearing, to which Mazarin’s policy had limited him. Beneath all the
magnificent assumption, the common sense and inner consciousness of
Louis were not likely to fail, as time passed, to show him that he
was but a cipher in the scheme of the universe, an atom; and under
the theological direction of his Jesuit confessor, an exaggerated
estimate of his own sinfulness and imperfections crushed him into
melancholy and self-surrender, till he actually and honestly imagined
that eternal punishment threatened, unless he humbled himself,
as he did to the dust, to follow the instruction of his Jesuit
confessor. Yet Madame de Maintenon herself laments that “she could
never make him understand that humility was a Christian virtue.” _À
qui la faute?_ His most intimate exemplar of the attribute was one
more outwardly shining than profound. There have been apologists for
Madame de Maintenon, and for Père la Chaise, and for these promoters
of the Nantes Revocation they do not seem to be superfluous, these
“_Pièces Justificatives_,” of the _gouvernante_ of the Montespan’s
children, and later of their father. The Duc de St Simon, among many
other writers, makes less than no extenuation; while, on the other
hand, he describes Père la Chaise as a strong Jesuit, yet withal
neither fanatical nor fawning—and yet more powerfully still in his
favour, he says that although he advised the Revocation of the Edict
of Nantes, he was no party to the merciless persecution by which it
was followed.
Forgetting, or rather ignoring, his own youth, Louis imposed rigorous
discipline upon all about him. The merest peccadillo incurred
possibilities of imprisonment, and only absolute impeccability being
tolerated, pharisaism and hypocrisy were rampant. The royal children
and grandchildren were required, on pain of utter disgrace, to
make weekly confession, and no choice of a spiritual director was
permitted the Grand Dauphin. To Père la Chaise, and to him alone,
was committed the conscience of the Jansenist Fénelon’s pupil; and
at the great annual festivals of the Church, all the members of the
royal family were required to communicate publicly. The Duchess of
Burgundy was sorely rebuked for a breach of this regulation.
The consideration and deference often only meagrely accorded to Queen
Maria Théresa, was never lacking to Louis’s morganatic wife. One day,
at the camp of Compiègne, on the occasion of a mock siege, the king
stood hat in hand, for more than an hour beside her carriage door,
explaining to her the manœuvres of the troops. Any reference not
entirely and absolutely complimentary to Madame Louis Quatorze, or
to anything connected with her past life, would rouse him to violent
anger. It would have seemed that the two went in mortal fear of each
other.
Such a slip of the tongue helped to bring about the disgrace of
Racine. He had long been admitted on an intimate friendly footing
with the royal family, and having in mind a wish to write a history
of the reign of Louis XIV., he was in the habit of bringing his notes
on the projected work to read to Madame de Maintenon. His honest and
veracious nature would have been untrue to itself if he had failed to
animadvert on the defectiveness of the system of administration in
regard to the people, burdened and suffering as they were under heavy
taxation, resulting from prodigality in high places, and the enormous
expenses of the wars, which, glorious as they were, spelt ruin for
the general population. The sympathy and pity of Madame de Maintenon
were genuinely and deeply stirred by the eloquent word-picture
the poet had drawn of this; and she suggested that he should draw
up a memoir of what he thought could be done for alleviating the
widespread misery and distress. Upon this memoir Racine fell to work,
and when completed, he first submitted it for Madame’s perusal; but,
unfortunately, Louis entering at the moment, glanced his eye over the
manuscript, and his wrath kindled. “As Monsieur Racine could make
excellent verses, he fancied that he knew everything,” he said. “Not
content with being a great poet, he must needs imagine he could be a
minister of State,” and wrathfully frowning, the king went out. And
in addition to this offence, Racine had stumbled on the almost more
heinous crime of stirring up the memory of Scarron. Louis, in course
of discussion with Racine on the cause of the decadence of comedy,
or, rather, the diminution of the favour with which it had come to be
regarded, expressed wonder that this should be the case.
“Sire,” said Racine, “there are several causes. Since Molière’s
death, no comedy-writer seems, if he exists, to have dared to enter
his field, and the actors have no material. One cannot always play
Molière; and lacking other plays, they find refuge in the detestable
pieces of Scarron, and—”
But Racine never finished that comment. The words froze on his lips,
and silenced by the scarlet flush on Madame de Maintenon’s face,
and the uncontrollable trembling of the king, as if some reptile
had stung him, Racine, recognising his blunder, stammered out some
words which only made things worse. The whilom wife of the criticised
dead play-writer cast furious glances at the tragic poet, while
Louis said, in tones seething with anger—“I have recently seen
certain scribbled comments of yours, Monsieur, in which you make an
attempt to account for the misery suffered by the people during my
rule. Poets are generally wretched statesmen, and, moreover, we do
not permit criticism, direct or indirect upon our authority. Ah,”
he added, when again Racine strove to defend himself, “no excuses.
Remain at home for the future; and direct the course of your studies
into other channels.”
So Racine received his dismissal from Versailles, and soon after,
taking his disgrace to heart, the melancholy, long stolen over him
from ill-health, increased, and aggravated the cruel disease to which
he succumbed after an operation conducted by the unskilful physician
who attended him. The king’s heart softened towards him during those
last days, and he was constantly sending messengers to inquire after
him. Racine was interred in the cemetery of the place to which his
heart had so warmly attached itself—Port Royal; but after the
destruction of the monastery and the Grange, some twelve years later,
his remains were transferred to Paris, and laid in the church of St
Étienne du Mont, beside those of Pascal; and Louis bestowed a pension
of 2000 livres on his widow, and a reversion of it to her children,
till the death of the last of them.
In the death of Madame de Sévigné, Ninon lost another friend. The
troops of enthusiastic admirers of this most delightful woman and
letter-writer would render further endeavour in the way of eulogy
trite and superfluous. To know her in life must have been to
experience an extraordinary satisfaction; but the content is left to
know her through that flow of correspondence—the voluminous letters
touching upon every conceivable topic of contemporary interest.
From descriptions of Court life and its glitter and splendour, to
the hideous details recorded of the prisoner Brinvilliers, or the
terrible tragedy of the Brittany gentleman in the ballroom, or the
skilful gamester, Dangeau, or Picard, the Paris footman who wouldn’t
make hay. “He was not engaged,” he said, “for such work. It was none
of his business—the silly fellow. If you see him, don’t welcome him;
don’t protect him; and don’t blame me. Only look upon him as of all
the servants in the world the least addicted to hay-making.”
“It is the same with her,” says one English commentator. “From the
first letter quoted, to the last; from the proud and merry boasting
of the young mother with a boy, to the candid shudder about the
approach of old age, and the refusal of Death to grant a moment to
the dying statesman Louvois—‘No, not a single moment.’ She loved
nature and truth without misgiving, and nature and truth loved her
in return, and have crowned her with glory and honour.”[9]