life." She belongs to the race of lightsome, vivacious spirits—occasionally brusque in manner, and unrestrained in speech—such as Ninon and La Fontaine; a generation elder in period and younger in heart than that of Racine and Boilleau. As Madame de la Fayette told her, she seemed born for pleasure, and pleasure created for her; her presence lent new charms to the amusements of life, and they to the inspiration of her beauty—which beauty, real, though a little irregular, radiated light and sparkles all around when itself lit up by joyous animation. Rightly is it affirmed that this queen of letter-writers is, like Montaigne, like La Fontaine, one of those subjects which are always the order of the day in France—not only a classic, but an acquaintance; and, better still, a neighbour and a friend.
Such another subject, in respect of national interest, is Madame de la Vallière; of whom, if M. Sainte-Beuve says nothing new, he repeats the traditional eulogies in his own approved and well-ordered manner. She is one of the historical names which, tarnished though they be, yet in a cemetery of French soil, and to a people constitutionally disposed to be a little blind to faults and very kind to virtues such as hers,
Smell sweet and blossom in the dust.
To France she is the ideal of the lover in disinterestedness, faithfulness, and devoted tenderness—the ideal, moreover, of touching and sincere penitence. Comparing her with Madame de Fontanges, a languishing and somewhat vain-glorious beauty, Madame de Sévigné applies to her a description almost identical with Wordsworth's figure of Lucy, as "a violet by a mossy stone half-hidden from the eye." Her cloister life, as Louise, Sister of Mercy, is here pleasingly sketched—a seclusion which certainly testifies as strongly to her depth of heart, as it does to the heartlessness of the Grand Monarque. Then again we have a careful study of the most renowned of her successors in his majesty's graces, the serious and sagacious widow of Scarron, and ultimately[1] the widow of "Lewis Baboon" himself. Madame de Maintenon is no special favourite with our intelligent Causeur. What service, he asks, did she ever render France? and makes haste to answer, None—excepting the day when she bade Racine write a sacred drama for St Cyr. Active, obliging—thus he defines her—insinuating without meanness, interesting herself adroitly in the pleasures and pains of others, yet perfectly devoid of real sympathy; an intellectual coquette; tolerably winning at a distance, by a certain imposing air of noble simplicity and dignified discretion; her dominant passion a love of personal consideration; her safeguard through life a punctilious and cold-blooded respect for religion. That for no one moment throughout her protracted life she surrendered herself to an impulse of the heart,—this, he affirms, is the secret of the coldness she inspires us withal, much as might
A stoic of the court—a dame without a tear.
- ↑ Long has the controversy lasted, whether Madame de Maintenon altogether, or almost, persuaded Louis to be her husband. Here a miss is as good as a mile. Yet people have been somehow accustomed to regard her as a sort of matrimonial tertium quid, a kind of "betwixt and between." She has been discussed as a historical enigma. But St. Simon, her contemporary, calls the enigma transparent. However, formal proofs of what Win Jenkins would call the "matter-o-money-alsurrymony," have not been produced—from the days of St. Simon, who fixes the date of the private espousals at 1683 (the year of the queen's death), to the Duc de Nuailles, who (in his "Histoire de Madame Maintenon," 1848) places it two year later—though without new documents to back his plausible scheme.
