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constantly on the increase, and we may | ject was not to write an apologia, but to designate the century from 1483 to 1590 clear up these uncertainties, and present, with the exception of Louis XII.'s as far as possible, an impartial picture of reign as the era of the ascendency of her life and work. women and favorites. The kings were either nobodies or were under the thumb of their wives or mistresses; during the youth of Charles VIII. his elder sister, Anne of Beaujou, governed, who seemed to have inherited the political sagacity of her father. But the influence of Louise of Savoy over her son, Francis I., was disastrous to the best interests of France. Under her, it was said, "the women the king's favorites "made everything, even the generals,” and the bishops. The next king, Henry II., was completely in the hands of a widow much older than himself, Diana of Poitiers. And thus we are brought to the Italian and Machiavellian policy of Catherine de Medici and Mary, wife of Henry IV., and mother of Louis XIII. From both of them, as well as from the regent Anne and her foreign favorite, Mazarin, France had to learn to its cost the dangers and disasters of female supremacy. It ended in anarchy, and treasonable compact with Spain, but served meanwhile to aggrandize the absolutism of the crown. And under the baneful influence of Anne and Cardinal Mazarin, Louis XIV. grew up in ignorance, pride, self-importance, and the habitual dependence on female guidance which marked his character and conduct through life. It has been said, with much truth, that when, after the death of Mazarin, he took the reins into his own hands, the modified despotism carried on by Richelieu and Mazarin was converted into a brutal tyranny, masked, for the time, by the glitter of military and intellectual glory, but which, a century later, provoked the terrible collapse of the whole ancien régime.

Three main sources of these erroneous judgments may be named. First, there is the elaborate publication which appeared soon after her death, by La Beaumelle, a bold and unscrupulous fabulist, who had no hesitation about fabricating, mutilating, and interpolating the letters he ascribed to her. This was suspected before, but has been demonstrated since 1866, through the publication of the originals by La Vallée. La Beaumelle's aim was to represent her as a cold and calculating schemer, while he also sought to cast suspicion on the purity of her earlier life. These spurious or falsified letters have been widely quoted, and even in our own day are constantly used in the great work of the Count de Noailles; the fictitious presentation of her character has not, therefore, yet disappeared from history. And meanwhile the accidental coincidence in time of the exposure of La Beaumelle's forgeries with the composition of a number of forged letters of Marie Antoinette suggested at Paris a hypercritical suspicion of the genuineness of the letters edited by La Vallée, which has been shown to be groundless. Next to La Beaumelle the Count of Saint Simon must be reckoned as a chief author of these misjudgments. He knew little of Madame de Maintenon personally, but detested her, as well because she had thrust herself into a position at court which degraded the king in the eyes of Europe, as because he saw in her the patroness and educator of the legitimated princes, whom he abhorred. And, with these feelings, he lent a ready ear to the idle gossip current at Versailles among valets and chambermaids, about a woman It was a noted characteristic of Louis sure, in her position, to make many eneXIV.'s reign that a change of royal mis-mies. How worthless such testimony was tresses was a political event. But we has been shown by Chéruel and Ranke. need not linger here over the career of We may add, thirdly, the witness who the Duchesse de la Vallière, Madame de naturally found most credence in GerMontespan, and the rest of the long series many, the land of her birth, viz., Elizabeth of his famous or insignificant favorites. Charlotte, Duchess of Orleans, wife of Our present concern is with the last and the king's younger brother, whose offences most powerful of all of them, Madame de against herself she chose to attribute to Maintenon, who still more than a cen- Madame de Maintenon. Hence she detury and a half after her death-lives in picts her supposed enemy as a murderess, the historical results of her influence; a procuress, and everything that is infathough there is scarcely one of her sex mous, and the cause of all the evils that whose character, both in life and in death, came upon France; but she offers no has been so variously, and often so un-proof of an indictment which is directly in fairly, handled, as well in her own country the teeth of all trustworthy historical evias by foreign critics. Dr. Döllinger's ob- dence, and finds no support even in St.

Simon's adverse and unreliable representations. Dr. Döllinger examines, in detail, the origin and value of the verdict thus pronounced, and makes it plain, as well from the character and circumstances of the duchess as from the contradictory nature both of her statements and her acts, that her testimony is absolutely worthless. And now we may proceed to the proper subject of this sketch.

tion with Madame de Montespan, not with any arrière pensée for her own personal interests, for the much-wronged queen was younger than herself, and she did, in fact, succeed in bringing about a reconciliation between husband and wife. From 1680 her influence and celebrity was at its height, and she was called "the soul of the court."

next year the king was privately married In July, 1683, the queen died; and early by night to Madame de Maintenon by Archbishop de Harlay, in presence of Père la Chaise and two attached servants; he was then forty-eight and his bride fifty. two. There has indeed been as much controversy about the fact as about the marriage of George IV. with Mrs. Fitzherbert; but the letters addressed by the Bishop of Chartres, who was in the se crets both of Madame de Maintenon and the king, leave no room for doubt about it. She took this step with no ambitious aims, and with no design of their union being made public, in accordance with the counsels of her spiritual guides - backed up, according to a tradition preserved at St. Cyr, by the authority of two or three bishops and of the pope himself - who assured her that it was her duty and her mission to accept this position as a means of permanently influencing the king for the good of his own soul and of the Church and nation. The situation was a trying and very peculiar one, but it is difficult to say that, under all the circumstances, they were wrong. From that time till the king's death, thirty years afterwards, her hold on his affections and his judgment remained unbroken.

Agrippa d'Aubigné, Madame de Maintenon's grandfather, was among the most distinguished Frenchmen of his day, a champion of the Reformed cause with sword and pen, and a friend and comradein-arms of Henry IV. His son was little worthy of him, and, after a course of poverty and crime, emigrated to America with his wife and infant daughter, Frances, who was born in prison. After his death, mother and child returned to France, where the latter was for a time brought up by a Protestant aunt, but was afterwards sent to a convent school, and, after some resistance, at the age of twelve, consented to embrace Catholicism. After her mother's death, when only fifteen, she married the comedian, Paul Scarron, in order to avoid the necessity of becoming a nun; but the marriage was a mere formality, and she lived with her husband as his secretary and pupil rather than as his wife. To him she owed the education which enabled her, after his death, to take her place in the learned society of Paris, and this led to her being selected as the instructress of the children Madame de Montespan had borne to the king, and her introduction into the court circle when these children were publicly acknowledged by him in 1673. But Louis did not at first take much notice of her, while the was affable, gracious, and condescending; In his personal deportment Louis XIV. jealous dislike of Madame de Montespan but for him to reign meant to rule, and to became so manifest, that but for the ad-rule the souls as well as the bodies of his vice of her confessor, the Abbé Gobelin, she would have resigned her post. It was only by degrees that Louis discovered, as Madame de Sévigné expresses it, "an entirely new country" opened to him in her society, where he might enjoy the pleasures of friendship without passionate excitement.* Through his favor she obtained the landed property from which her name of Maintenon is derived, and the office of maid of honor to the dauphiness. She had already, in 1675, at the suggestion of her confessor, exerted her influence with the king to remind him of the sinfulness of his doubly adulterous connec

• Voltaire says that "his tormented soul required the sedative of her reasonable, intellectual conversation."

subjects.

preme importance; in him was concenHis royal dignity was of sutrated the greatness of the nation and the State, according to his favorite saying, L'état, c'est moi. liefs were indissolubly bound up with this And his religious beextravagant_estimate of his own unique majesty. France, as the principal and most eminent European kingdom, "the eldest daughter of the Church," stood at the head of Christendom; it was the duty of the king of France-who was therefore styled "Most Christian "and" eldest son of the Church"-to be the champion of the Catholic faith, the sworn foe and more widely his dominion was extended, exterminator of every heresy. And the the better could he discharge that office.

Hence the wars he waged became wars | indeed, during the later part of his reign, of religion; and when Louis said that his be ignorant of the suffering and poverty pleasantest occupation was to aggrandize which his wars, his passion for building, France, this pleasure was to him elevated and his general extravagance had brought and sanctified by the conviction that upon his people; but he had learned from every enlargement of his kingdom was Richelieu's Testament- which was then also a fresh gain for the Church. Even held in high esteem at court that a cerwhen compelled to resign some of his con- tain amount of poverty is useful for requests in the Treaty of Ryswick, he got a pressing popular insolence. But it was clause inserted by which three thousand with him a fixed principle - which his Protestant congregations were deprived Jesuit confessor Le Tellier got the Sorof their religious liberty. An overween- bonne to affirm as a theological verity ing, not to say insolent, pride was his that the king is the real owner of all corleading characteristic. He was proud porate or individual property, ecclesiastieven of the wretchedly defective edu- cal or civil, in the country, as he is also cation in spite of which he had made the absolute master of all individuals or himself master, had educated his own corporations. Hence his contemptuous ministers, and had raised France to the ignoring from the first of all Parliamentary hegemony of Europe; proud of the fasci- rights; hence, again, his habitual asnation he exercised over all classes of his sumption that no promises or compacts subjects, in spite of the heavy burdens he can bind the will of the sovereign, so that imposed upon them; proud of his victo- he became notorious both in France and ries both in diplomacy and in war, by in Europe as a ruler whose word could which he was constantly extending the not be trusted. For to his mind absolute borders of France. And this arrogance monarchy was not one form of governwas fed by the incessant homage and flat- ment out of many, but the only one in tery of all classes, with the clergy and accordance with the will of God. No. bishops at their head, including the nobil- Tory apologist under the Stuarts of "the ity, so refractory at the time of the Fronde, right divine of kings to govern wrong who now appeared to consider it their ever maintained that doctrine more unhighest privilege to cringe as courtiers in compromisingly than Louis XIV. Mathe ante-chamber of Versailles. And dame de Maintenon assures us that he thus his egotism was the logical and in- earnestly desired to see his people well-off evitable outgrowth of his solitary abso- and comfortable; but, if so, he was, at all lutism; he was intoxicated by the mephitic events, content to let the wish remain an atmosphere of a corrupt and corrupting unfruitful one. court. And yet there was another side of his character. As was observed just now, and as Boileau testifies, he was gentle and forbearing in his domestic circle; and his wife declared, in 1707, when misfortunes were thickening around him, that there were thousands less willing than he was to be told of their faults—that is by herself. For few men would have ventured on such a task; he could not endure the society of men of real independence of character and thought. Although constantly suffering from gout and other bodily infirmities, he never relaxed his energy; "the man was frequently ill, but the king seemed to be always in robust health.' He firmly believed, like our Stuart kings, in his royal power of healing, and laid his hands on hundreds who came to Versailles for that purpose every time he received communion. He not only never distrusted his own judgment, but he sincerely admired the wisdom and success of his policy, and attributed failure to "those adverse chances from which the greatest are not exempt." He could not,

We have seen already that we can only accept with much reserve the assertions of St. Simon or the Duchess of Orleans about her, but they have preserved some traits which are unmistakable. And there is unfortunately, as La Bruyère observes, a great dearth of reliable contemporary evidence, for the rigid censorship of the press was fatal alike to history and biog raphy in France, while the testimony of refugees is neither impartial nor based on adequate knowledge. The Abbé Choisy has little to tell us beyond the fact of the midnight marriage; the Duke of Berwick and Torcy, who might have told much, say nothing; and La Fare, who was one of the Orleans clique, says only what is false on the subject in his memoirs. Not so the instructive memoirs of Languet de Gergy, afterwards Bishop of

liament was resisting his edicts, he rode from VinOn hearing, when a boy of seventeen, that the Parcennes to Paris, entered the Palace of Justice, booted and spurred and brandishing his riding-whip, and dispersed the assembly, ordering them henceforth to confine themselves strictly to their judicial functions. And he was obeyed.