A Popular History of France from the Earliest Times | Page 7

her mistress of the robes.
"I am told," writes Madame de Sevigne, "that the king's conversations
do nothing but increase and improve, that they last from six to ten
o'clock, that the daughter-in-law goes occasionally to pay them a
shortish visit, that they are found each in a big chair, and that, when the
visit is over, the talk is resumed. The lady is no longer accosted without
awe and respect, and the ministers pay her the court which the rest do.
No friend was ever so careful and attentive as the king is to her; she

makes him acquainted with a perfectly new line of country--I mean the
intercourse of friendship and conversation, without chicanery and
without constraint; he appears to be charmed with it."
Discreet and adroit as she was, and artificial without being false,
Madame de Maintenon gloried in bringing back the king and the court
to the ways of goodness. "There is nothing so able as irreproachable
conduct," she used to say. The king often went to see the queen; the
latter heaped attentions upon Madame de Maintenon. "The king never
treated me more affectionately than he has since she had his ear," the
poor princess would say. The dauphiness had just had a son. The joy at
court was excessive. "The king let anybody who pleased embrace him,"
says the Abbe de Croisy; "he gave everybody his hand to kiss. Spinola,
in the warmth of his zeal, bit his finger; the king began to exclaim. 'Sir,'
interrupted the other, 'I ask your Majesty's pardon; but, if I hadn't bitten
you, you would not have noticed me.' The lower orders seemed beside
themselves, they made bonfires of everything. The porters and the
Swiss burned the poles of the chairs, and even the floorings and
wainscots intended for the great gallery. Bontemps, in wrath, ran and
told the king, who burst out laughing and said, 'Let them be; we will
have other floorings.'"
The least clear-sighted were beginning to discern the modest beams of
a rising sun. Madame de Montespan, who had a taste for intellectual
things, had not long since recommended Racine and Boileau to the king
to write a history of his reign. They had been appointed
historiographers. "When they had done some interesting piece," says
Louis Racine in his Memoires, "they used to go and read it to the king
at Madame de Montespan's. Madame de Maintenon was generally
present at the reading. She, according to Boileau's account, liked my
father better than him, and Madame de Montespan, on the contrary,
liked Boileau better than my father, but they always paid their court
jointly, without any jealousy between them. When Madame de
Montespan would let fall some rather tart expressions, my father and
Boileau, though by no means sharp-sighted, observed that the king,
without answering her, looked with a smile at Madame de Maintenon,
who was seated opposite to him on a stool, and who finally disappeared

all at once from these meetings. They met her in the gallery, and asked
her why she did not come any more to hear their readings. She
answered very coldly, 'I am no longer admitted to those mysteries.' As
they found a great deal of cleverness in her, they were mortified and
astonished at this. Their astonishment was very much greater, then,
when the king, being obliged to keep his bed, sent for them with orders
to bring what they had newly written of history, and they saw as they
went in Madame de Maintenon sitting in an arm-chair near the king's
pillow, chatting familiarly with his Majesty. They were just going to
begin their reading, when Madame do Montespan, who had not been
expected, came in, and after a few compliments to the king, paid such
long ones to Madame de Maintenon, that the king, to stop them, told
her to sit down. 'As it would not be fair,' he added, 'to read without you
a work which you yourself ordered.' From this day, the two historians
paid their court to Madame de Maintenon as far as they knew how to
do so."
The queen had died on the 30th of July, 1683, piously and gently, as
she had lived. "This is the first sorrow she ever caused me," said the
king, thus rendering homage in his superb and unconscious egotism, to
the patient virtue of the wife he had put to such cruel trials. Madame de
Maintenon was agitated but resolute. "Madame de Montespan has
plunged into the deepest devoutness," she wrote, two months after the
queen's death; "it is quite time she edified us; as for me, I no longer
think of retiring." Her strong common sense and her far-sighted
ambition, far more than her virtue, had secured her against rocks ahead;
henceforth she saw the