The Sun King (20 page)

Mme de Brinon was a woman of character and intelligence, an Ursuline nun whose convent had been obliged to shut for lack of funds. Her school began at Rueil. Mme de Maintenon interested the King in it; they decided to enlarge it and bring it to the neighbourhood of Versailles where Mme de Maintenon could keep an eye on it. At the bottom of the park there was a little hamlet called Saint-Cyr, clustering round an ancient convent of Benedictines. The King sent for the Mother Superior and asked whether she and her nuns would not like to move to
Paris. But she respectfully begged that they might be allowed to stay where Good King Dagobert had placed them. The King told Mme de Maintenon that he could dislodge them with a
lettre de cachet
, but she thought that would be an unfortunate beginning for her scheme. So new premises had to be built and Mansart got to work, with the assistance of the army, which in times of peace, always provided builders for the King. Mme de Maintenon told him to design her a large plain house like a barracks; neither luxury nor beauty were required. She herself saw to every detail of the interior decoration and plain but pretty furnishings — the linen she bought was of such excellent quality that it lasted fifty years. There was room for two hundred and fifty girls between the ages of six and nineteen; thirty-six lady professors (known as the Dames) of the same social category as the girls and very little older than they were, and twenty-four lay sisters. The Dames were to be called Madame and their surname.

The whole point of the scheme was that Saint-Cyr should not be a convent. Mme de Maintenon had married the Z-shaped Scarron sooner than enter one; and the King was against religious establishments, especially for women who, he thought, became dour and stultified in them. His wish was to improve the education of the women-folk of his
race guerrière
, not to shut them up and condemn them to sterility. Père de La Chaise agreed, saying there were plenty of good nuns in the world and not enough good mothers. So it was arranged that the Dames and the sisters would take simple, not perpetual, vows; the girls were to be brought up with a view to living in the world; and the whole atmosphere was to be one of civilized piety. Saint-Cyr would provide a good general education. The young ladies must converse and write in excellent French, giving the proper value to each word and constructing solid phrases. They would learn poetry by heart and do a great deal of decorative needlework. (One of their first achievements was an altar cloth for the cathedral at Strasbourg, a recent French conquest.) The girls and the Dames were to be on friendly terms with each other and the lessons must be given in an easy, smiling, natural way; there was to be no strict and painful holiness, and no unnecessary rules.

The constitution of Saint-Cyr was drawn up by Mme de Maintenon, Mme de Brinon and the King, approved by Père de La Chaise and Mme de Maintenon's confessor; the language was corrected by Racine and Boileau, and the final document sent to the Pope. Innocent XI was asked to approve a transfer of funds from the rich Abbey of Saint-Denis, but, on bad terms with the King, he most unsportingly made difficulties which were only resolved after his death. Mme de Brinon was to be Superior for life and Mme de Maintenon to enjoy pre-eminence, honours, prerogatives and entire authority. She was also to have a flat for herself and her household (kept up at the expense of the school) which she could occupy whenever she pleased. Indeed many of the courtiers thought her main object in founding this institution was to get away
from all the fresh air at Versailles. Whenever the King went to her room the first thing he did was to fling open the windows, only allowing them to be shut when he left. Mme de Maintenon sat shivering in a
tonneau
or hooded chair, covered with rugs and shawls, but he never took the hint. At Saint-Cyr she used to get into a warm bed on arrival and often stayed there all day.

The girls were chosen by the King, after d'Hozier, his genealogist, had looked at their pedigrees (four degrees of nobility on the father's side were required). The list of their names and birthplaces makes amusing reading for anybody who knows France. They were never allowed to forget that they were the daughters of warriors. The King and his generals used to go and worship the God of Battles among these innocent souls before leaving for the front. The girls were told to pray, not for victory but for peace, which in those days of French supremacy came to the same thing.

The King took a great interest in the uniform, saying that it must be unlike that of nuns, with plenty of white muslin and ribbons. Mme de Maintenon's maid put on various models, to show him. A lightly woven brown woollen stuff was chosen, to be lined with fur in winter and striped cotton in summer. An apron to match was edged with ribbon showing to which form the wearer belonged. The girls were enjoined to care for their looks since beauty is a gift from God, and told to do their hair well, indeed fashionably, and cover it with a prettier version of a nun's veil. The Dames had the same dress with no apron. They wore a gold cross, inscribed with words by Racine:

One was not quite sure whether
elle
referred to the cross or Mme de Maintenon.

The house was ready in 1686; the women were brought there in royal coaches, preceded by the relics of St Candida. Crowds from Versailles and the neighbourhood lined the road to see them go by; Mme de Maintenon was at the door, to greet them with the words: ‘These walls are my retreat and my tomb; may this establishment live as long as France, and France as long as the world!' One of the first visitors was Athénaïs de Montespan, bringing her youngest daughter, Mlle de Blois, aged ten. Then all the princes and princesses came and by degrees most of the courtiers. Saint-Cyr was a nine days' wonder.

As this was the time of the King's operation he only came himself a few weeks later. He was greeted by three hundred fresh young voices chanting an anthem with words by Mme de Brinon and music by Lully:

For Mme de Brinon was the author of ‘God Save the King'. Lully's tune has been lost.

The King inspected everything. He talked to the girls, made a speech to the Dames, attended Mass and ended by thanking Mme de Maintenon for the pleasure it had all given him. From now on Saint-Cyr was to be a life within a life for him as well as for her. The troubles he had brought on himself by the revocation of the Edict of Nantes were beginning to harass him and he liked to forget them for an hour or two among his wife's pretty little pupils. He was at his very best there; he shed his terrifying majesty and turned into a kind old uncle, taking little girls on his knee, chatting with them and hearing them recite their lessons. Never had he been so natural with his own family. His eagle eye saw everything, as it always did; he summed up the children's characters, knew who was happy, who had been crying, who was mutinous. As for Mme de Maintenon, she was there, in the beginning, two days out of every three, often arriving at 6 a.m. and only leaving ten or twelve hours later. She attended to every material detail, from brushing the hair of the very little ones to the composition of the meals. On summer evenings the King would join her there, go to Compline in the chapel and walk home with her. It could not have been foreseen, at this stage, what a source of worry Saint-Cyr was to become.

Since part of the curriculum consisted in learning and reciting poetry, Mme de Brinon, with the approval of Mme de Maintenon, thought it would be a good idea to let the girls act little plays. She wrote them herself and they were on the silly side; Mme de Maintenon, who was obliged to sit through the performances, found them insupportable. She said the children really must be given something better, so they were then put on to
Andromaque
. The love and loathing of which this play are compounded were so well interpreted that Mme de Maintenon took fright. She wrote to Racine and said she could never allow the girls to act in one of his plays again unless he wrote one with a religious subject specially for them. Would he not do this?

Racine was in high favour at the Court. He was Gentleman-in-Ordinary to the King who said that his handsome, rubicund, jolly face was one of those liked best. When the King suffered from insomnia, Racine would read aloud to him, which he did incomparably; he could read from a Latin text putting it into exquisite French as he went along. He and his inseparable friend, Boileau, were appointed to be the King's historiographers, in which capacity they used to go to the front. Like journalists in modern wars, they were regarded as a perfect nuisance by the soldiers; unlike the modern journalists, however, they were very
much against risking their skins. Racine told the King it was not surprising the soldiers were brave — their lives were so ghastly they must long for them to end; he had something to live for and had no wish to be carried off by a cannon ball. Indeed he loved the life at Versailles, he idolized the King and was under the glamour of high society. He said the secret of getting on with society people is never to speak of one's own work — let them think it is they who are brilliant. The King, seeing Racine out for a walk with the fascinating Marquis de Cavoye, said ‘I often see those two together and I'm sure I know why. Cavoye likes to think he is an intellectual and Racine fancies himself as a courtier'.

Racine was a Jansenist at heart; he had been partly brought up at Port-Royal where his aunt was one of the nuns. After the shock of nearly being involved in the Affair of the Poisons, he turned to religion. He married a holy person and four out of their five daughters became nuns. Mme Racine knew nothing about poetry and had never read, let alone seen, one of her husband's plays; to her as to all simple folk of the day, there was something damnable about the theatre and everything to do with it. Racine grew more and more obsessed with Jansenism; he gave up writing plays altogether and composed little things for Louis XIV, inscriptions for medals, the captions underneath tapestries and so on. He divided his time between Versailles, Port-Royal and his happy family life in the street which is now called rue Visconti, in Paris.

When Mme de Maintenon asked Racine to write a religious play for her girls to act, he went off to consult Boileau who said the whole idea was ridiculous. Racine agreed with him. But then, as so often happens with writers, the proposition turned in his head until finally he conceived
Esther
, a play about the existing situation and characters at Versailles, dressed up in biblical garb. Mme de Maintenon, who was portrayed most flatteringly as holy Esther, triumphing over Mme de Montespan (
l'altière Vasthi dont j'occupe la place
) was delighted with the play; and the young actresses, choir and so on were put to work. She said it was good for them to have something on hand which kept them busy, filled their heads with beautiful words and stopped them gossiping.

They had good reason to gossip, for a crisis had arisen in the school. The girls, the Dames and Mme de Brinon herself would hardly have been human if all the fuss that was made of them had not turned their heads. They began to assume an intolerably self-important air. The girls, most of whom came from dull little country homes, soon had visions of some Prince Charming who would carry them off to a glittering existence at the Court. In vain did Mme de Maintenon hold forth on the boredom of Versailles; they could hardly be expected to believe her. In the end, their hopes of marriage were seldom fulfilled; Mme de Maintenon was always to complain that there were not enough of what she called sons-in-law. ‘Alas, my children, few men prefer your virtues to other people's dowries.' She consoled them by saying that
marriage makes three-quarters of the human race miserable (it was one of her favourite observations); the woman has to submit to such dreadful things. ‘When the young ladies find themselves faced with the ordeal of marriage they will see that it is no laughing matter.' However, at the beginning, when Saint-Cyr was so much in the news, a few excellent matches were made, notably that of the future Lady Bolingbroke who married an ancient, rich M. de Villette.

Mme de Brinon, thoroughly spoilt by Mme de Maintenon, began to see herself as a key personage of the realm, confidante of the King himself, a sort of female minister. She let it be understood that she could help people to obtain benefits at Versailles. She surrounded herself with favourites in the school, holding a little court of her own; her room there was absurdly luxurious and over-decorated. She went to take the cure at Bourbon and behaved in a mad way, like a reigning mistress, receiving delegations from local big-wigs; when she got back to Saint-Cyr she was bold enough to criticize and even to undo some changes made by Mme de Maintenon in her absence. Mme de Maintenon watched all this with growing disgust. Suddenly she took a high hand with Mme de Brinon and told her that everybody at Saint-Cyr, the Dames, the girls and not least the Superior, had become impossible. She proposed to take away some of her friend's prerogatives, to punish her. Mme de Brinon hit back, pointing out that under the constitution of Saint-Cyr she was there for life. The girls and the Dames were on her side and let this be felt; there were mutinous faces everywhere.

Mme de Maintenon sat alone in her room, pondering the next move. It was nothing less than a
lettre de cachet
, signed by the King, digging out Mme de Brinon and ordering her to go at once to a convent. She left early in the morning, without saying goodbye to anybody, by the garden gate, where a hackney carriage awaited her. The Dames and the girls were thunderstruck and inconsolable when this departure became known. Mme de Maintenon assembled them and said that in spite of all she owed to Mme de Brinon, they differed too much on matters of policy; therefore it was best that they should part. In fact the two women remained on friendly terms and corresponded for years. Mme de Brinon also had the satisfaction of acting as go-between for Bossuet and Leibniz, who wrote to each other, through her, about possibly unifying the Catholic and Lutheran Churches. She was a clever person, but too masterful to be able to work with Mme de Maintenon for long.