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 polishedfloors, 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.
Thediablerieat 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 ahamlet 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 enmitytowards 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 theghost’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 punishmentthreatened, 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 thegouvernanteof 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 atthe 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 Maintenonwere 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 reptilehad 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]
“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]