A Popular History of France from the Earliest Times | Page 2

the most fundamental maxims of
Christianity." "As the principal hope for the reforms I contemplated
establishing in my kingdom lay in my own will," says he in his
Memoires, "the first step towards their foundation was to render my
will quite absolute by a line of conduct which should induce
submission and respect, rendering justice scrupulously to any to whom
I owed it, but, as for favors, granting them freely and without constraint
to any I pleased and when I pleased, provided that the sequel of my acts
showed that, for all my giving no reason to anybody, I was none the
less guided by reason."
[Illustration: THE GRAND MONARCH IN HIS STATE ROBES----9]
The principle of absolute power, firmly fixed in the young king's mind,
began to pervade his court from the time that he disgraced Fouquet and
ceased to dissemble his affection for Mdlle. de La Valliere. She was
young, charming, and modest. Of all the king's favorites she alone
loved him sincerely. "What a pity he is a king!" she would say. Louis
XIV. made her a duchess; but all she cared about was to see him and
please him. When Madame de Montespan began to supplant her in the

king's favor, the grief of Madame de La Valliere was so great that she
thought she should die of it. Then she turned to God, in penitence and
despair. Twice she sought refuge in a convent at Chaillot. "I should
have left the court sooner," she sent word to the king on leaving, "after
having lost the honor of your good graces, if I could have prevailed
upon myself never to see you again; that weakness was so strong in me
that hardly now am I capable of making a sacrifice of it to God; after
having given you all my youth, the rest of my life is not too much for
the care of my salvation." The king still clung to her. "He sent M.
Colbert to beg her earnestly to come to Versailles, and that he might
speak with her. M. Colbert escorted her thither; the king conversed for
an hour with her, and wept bitterly. Madame de Montespan was there
to meet her with open arms and tears in her eyes." "It is all
incomprehensible," adds Madame de Sevigne; "some say that she will
remain at Versailles, and at court, others that she will return to Chaillot;
we shall see." Madame de La Valliere remained three years at court,
"half penitent," she said humbly, detained there by the king's express
wish, in consequence of the tempers and jealousies of Madame de
Montespan, who felt herself judged and condemned by her rival's
repentance. Attempts were made to turn Madame de La Valliere from
her inclination for the Carmelites: "Madame," said Madame Scarron to
her one day, "here are you one blaze of gold: have you really
considered that at the Carmelites' before long, you will have to wear
serge?" She, however, persisted. She was already practising in secret
the austerities of the convent. "God has laid in this heart the foundation
of great things," said Bossuet, who supported her in her conflict: "the
world puts great hinderances in her way and God great mercies; I have
hopes that God will prevail; the uprightness of her heart will carry
everything."
[Illustration: Madame de la Valliere----10]
"When I am in trouble at the Carmelites'," said Madame de La Valliere,
as at last she quitted the court, "I will think of what those people have
made me suffer." "The world itself makes us sick of the world," said
Bossuet in the sermon he preached on the day of her taking the dress;
"its attractions have enough of illusion, its favors enough of

inconstancy, its rebuffs enough of bitterness, there is enough of
injustice and perfidy in the dealings of men, enough of unevenness and
capriciousness in their intractable and contradictory humors--there is
enough of it all, without doubt, to disgust us." "She was dead to me the
day she entered the Carmelites," said the king, thirty-five years later,
when the modest and fervent nun expired at last, in 1710, at her
convent, without having ever relaxed the severities of her penance. He
had married the daughter she had given him to the Prince of Conti.
"Everybody has been to pay compliments to this saintly Carmelite,"
says Madame de Sevigne, without appearing to perceive the singularity
of the alliance between words and ideas; "I was there too with
Mademoiselle. The Prince of Conti detained her in the parlor. What an
angel appeared to me at last! She had to my eyes all the charms we had
seen heretofore. I did not find her either puffy or sallow; she is less thin,
though, and more happy-looking. She has those same eyes of