I have just read a pleasing, sweet, simple, and even touching narrative, which rests and elevates the mind,—a narrative which all should read as I have done. It concerns, once more, Mme. de Maintenon; but Mme. de Maintenon taken this time on her practical side, which is least open to discussion, namely, her work and foundation of Saint-Cyr. M. le duc de Noailles had already given a brief but interesting account of it in his prelude to the “History of Madame de Maintenon,” but M. Théophile Lavallée has now published a complete and connected “History of Saint-Cyr,” which may be called definitive.
In studying the history of Mme. de Maintenon there has happened to M. Lavallée what will happen to all sound but prejudiced minds (and I sometimes meet with such) who will approach this distinguished personage and take pains to know her in her habit of life. I will not say that he is converted to her; that would be an ill-rendering of a simply equitable impression received by an upright mind; but he has brought justice to bear on that mass of fantastic and odiously vague imputations which have long been in circulation as to the assumed historical rôle of this celebrated woman. He sees her as she was, wholly concerned for the salvation of the king, for his reform, his decent amusement, for the interior life of the royal family, for the relief of the people, and doing all this, it is true, with more rectitude than enthusiasm, more precision than grandeur.
On the threshold of Saint-Cyr M. Lavallée has placed a portrait of its illustrious founder in which lives again that grace of hers, so real, so sober, so indefinable, which, liable as it is to disappear in the distance, should not be overlooked when at times her image seems to us too hard and cold. He borrows this portrait from a Dame de Saint-Cyr whose pen, in its vivacity and colour, is worthy of a Sévigné: “She had, at fifty years of age, a most agreeable tone of voice, an affectionate air, an open, smiling forehead, natural gesture with her beautiful hands, eyes of fire, and motions of an easy figure so cordial, so harmonious, that she put into the shade the greatest beauties of the Court.... At a first glance she seemed imposing, as if veiled in severity; the smile and the voice dispersed the cloud.”
Saint-Cyr, in its completed idea, was not only a girls’ school, then a convent for young ladies of rank, a good work and recreation for Mme. de Maintenon; it was something more loftily conceived, a foundation worthy in all respects of Louis XIV. and his epoch. Under Louis XIV., and especially during the second half of his reign, France, even in times of peace, was compelled to maintain its imposing military attitude and a powerful army of 150,000 men under arms. Louvois introduced a system of modern organization into that great body; though the essentially modern base, the regular and equal contribution of all to military service, was still lacking. The nobility, which was, and continued to be, the soul of war, found itself for the first time subjected to strict rules and obligations which offended its spirit and greatly aggravated its burdens. Consequently, royalty contracted towards it fresh duties. Louis XIV. saw this, and had the heart to meet his obligation,—first, by founding the Hôtel des Invalides, a part of which was reserved for old or wounded officers; secondly, by forming companies of Cadets, exercised at the frontier forts, in which four thousand sons of nobles were brought up; and thirdly (as soon as Mme. de Maintenon suggested to him the idea), by the foundation of the royal house of Saint-Cyr, intended for the education of two hundred and fifty noble but impoverished young ladies. The establishment in the succeeding century of the École Militaire, was the necessary complement of these monarchical foundations; it added all that was insufficient in the companies of Cadets.
The first thought of Saint-Cyr in Mme. de Maintenon’s mind did not rise to this height. Mme. de Maintenon was sincerely religious. She was no sooner drawn from indigence by the bounty of the king than she said in her own mind that she ought to shed something of that bounty on others as poor as she herself had once been. This idea of succouring poor young ladies and preserving them from dangers through which she herself had passed was a very old and very natural thing in her; she regarded it as a debt and an indemnity before God for her great fortune. Her first step was to gather a number of young ladies, for whose education she paid, at Montmorency, then at Rueil; at which latter place she gave more development to her good intention. She had always had a great taste for bringing up children, for teaching them, reproving and reprimanding them; it was one of her particular and prominent talents. From Rueil the Institution was transferred to Noisy, where it continued to increase, Mme. de Maintenon devoting to it every instant she could steal from the Court. She soon began to congratulate herself on its success. “Fancy my pleasure,” she writes to her brother, “when I return along the avenue, followed by the hundred and eighty-four young ladies who are here at the present time.”
Mme. de Maintenon was made for this sort of internal domestic government. She had the gift and the art of it; she enjoyed the full pleasure of it. That is no reason why we should estimate her merit to be less. Because she sought repose in action, delights in authority and familiarity, and because her self-love (from which we never part) found its satisfaction there, we should not the less admire her. An ancient poet, Simonides of Amorgos, in a satire against women, compares them for their dominant defects, when they are bad, to various species of animals (those Ancients were not gallant), but when he comes to a wise, useful, frugal, industrious, diligent, and fruitful woman he compares her to the bee. Mme. de Maintenon, in the bosom of this establishment of which she was the soul and the mother, ruling the hive in every sense, may be likened to the indefatigable bee. Such she had been all her life in the houses where she lived on a footing of friendship; putting them into order, cleanliness, decency, spreading a spirit of work about her, and at the same time doing honour also to the spirit of society and courtesy. What must it therefore have been in her own domain, her own foundation, in the hive of her predilection, with all her joy and all her pride as queen-bee and mother, having at last succeeded in producing the perfect ideal that was in her?
That ideal was patriotic and Christian both. One day, in an interview, the record of which was written down by her pious pupils, after telling them how little premeditated and foreseen was her great fortune at Court, she said with a transport and fire we should scarcely expect of her, but which was in her whenever she dwelt on a cherished topic:
“That is how it was with Saint-Cyr, which became insensibly what you see it to-day. I have often told you that I do not like new establishments; it is far better to support old ones. And yet, almost without thinking of it, I have made a new one. Every one believes that I, my head on my pillow, have planned this fine institution; but it is not so. God has brought about Saint-Cyr by degrees. If I had made a plan, I should have thought of the worries of execution, the difficulties, the details. I should have feared them; I should have said: ‘All this is far beyond me;’ courage would have failed me. Much compassion for indigent nobility, because I have been orphaned and poor myself, and knowledge of such a life, made me desire to assist it in my lifetime. But, while planning to do the good I could, I never dreamed of doing it after my death. That was a second thought, born of the first. May this establishment last as long as France itself, and France as long as the world! Nothing is dearer to me than my children of Saint-Cyr; I love their very dust. I offer myself, and all my attendants to serve them; I have no reluctance to be their servant if my service will teach them to do without that of others. It is to this I tend; this is my passion, this is my heart.”
It was in the year of her marriage (1684) that she applied herself, as an inward thank-offering towards Heaven, to perfect the attempt at Noisy, and to give it that first royal character which it assumed wholly after its removal to Saint-Cyr. She represented to the king, after a visit he had made to Noisy which had pleased him much, that “the greater part of the noble families of the kingdom were reduced to a pitiable state, owing to the costs their heads had been forced to incur in his service; that their children required support to prevent them from falling into utter degradation; that it would be a work worthy of his piety and greatness to make a settled establishment as a refuge for poor young girls of rank throughout the kingdom, where they could be brought-up piously to the duties of their condition.” Père de La Chaise approved the project; Louvois cried out at the expense; Louis XIV. himself seemed to hesitate. “Never did Queen of France,” he said, “do anything like this.” It was thus, and thus only, that Mme. de Maintenon allowed herself to manifest her secret but efficacious royalty.
The idea of the foundation of Saint-Cyr was accepted, and the king spoke of it to the council of August 15, 1684. Two years went by, during which the house was built [by Mansart at a cost of 1,200,000 francs], the endowments and revenues were settled, and the Constitution was prepared. Letters-patent were delivered in June, 1686, and the Community was transferred from Noisy to the new domicile between the 26th of July and the 1st of August. During the succeeding six years it felt its way and made tentative essays; these were most brilliant, and even glorious; never did Saint-Cyr make more noise in the world than during this period before it was firmly seated on its permanent and sure foundation.
Mme. de Maintenon had dreamed of an establishment like no other; where all should go by rule without being bound by vows; where absolutely nothing of the minutiæ and pettiness of convents should exist; maintaining, nevertheless, at the same time purity and ignorance of evil, while sharing, with prudence and Christian reserve, in the charms of society and polished intercourse. Louis XIV., who saw all things with a practical eye and in the interests of the State, approved of Saint-Cyr having nothing monastic about it, and would fain have kept it so. But precautions were needed in this first attempt of Mme. de Maintenon to mingle substantial qualities, reason, and charm, which she found it impossible to maintain; to do so all the mistresses and all the pupils needed a wisdom and strength equal to her own. To bring up young ladies in a “Christian, reasonable, and noble manner” was her object; but a danger soon appeared that nobleness would lead to contempt of humility, and reasonableness to a spirit of reasoning.
It was during these tentative years, while Saint-Cyr was trying its wings and working out its apprenticeship, that Mme. de Maintenon requested Racine to compose the sacred comedies that were there performed. If “Esther,” with the worldly consequences and the introduction of the élite of profane society that then ensued, proved a distraction and perhaps an imprudence and fault in Mme. de Maintenon’s management of the first Saint-Cyr, we feel that we ought not to cavil, and no one in the world can really blame her. “Esther” has remained, in the eyes of all, the crown of that establishment. The details of the composition of that adorable play and its representation are too well known to need repetition; they form one of the most graceful and assuredly the most original episodes of our dramatic literature. Nevertheless, Mme. de La Fayette, like a sensible woman, and one a little jealous, perhaps, of Mme. de Maintenon, found it a pretext to say:—
“Mme. de Maintenon, who is the foundress of Saint-Cyr, always busy with the purpose of amusing the king, is constantly introducing some novelty among the little girls brought up in that establishment, of which it may be said that it is worthy of the grandeur of the king and of the mind of her who invented and who conducts it. But sometimes the best-invented things degenerate considerably; and that establishment which, now that we have become devout, is the abode of virtue and piety, may some day, without any profound prophesying, be that of debauchery and impiety. For to believe that three hundred young girls can live there until they are twenty years old with a Court full of eager young men at their very doors, especially when the authority of the king will no longer restrain them,—to believe, I say, that young women and young men can be so near to each other without jumping the walls is scarcely reasonable.”
It became necessary, after the success of “Esther,” and the instigation given to the Court, to make a step backward and return to the spirit of the foundation, fortifying it by more severe regulations. The danger of the neighbourhood of Saint-Cyr to Versailles was indeed great; it was of the utmost consequence that Mme. de La Fayette’s prophecy should not be fulfilled, and that the young ladies of Saint-Cyr should in no wise resemble those of M. Alexandre Dumas. The lesson that Mme. de Maintenon drew from the representations of “Esther,” and the invasion of the profane was henceforth to say and resay ceaselessly to her teachers: “Hide your pupils; do not let them be seen.”
From the passage of Racine through Saint-Cyr, and that of Fénelon, there resulted (from the point of view of the foundation and its object) a number of unsuitable things in the midst of their graces. Fénelon developed a taste for refined and subtile piety suited only for choice souls; Racine, without intending it, created a taste for reading, poesy, and all such things, the perfume of which is sweet, but the fruit not always salutary. Mme. de Maintenon, however influenced she might herself be by these tastes, recognized with her natural good sense the necessity of finding a remedy, and of not allowing those young and tender spirits, some of whom were already taken with the new ideas, to go farther in that direction. Among the first pupils and mistresses of Saint-Cyr was a certain Mme. de La Maisonfort, a distinguished woman, with an inquiring spirit, fond of investigating, and made for quite another career than that which she had chosen. She could not bring herself to renounce the gratifications of her mind and taste or the sensitiveness of her feelings. Mme. de Maintenon made war upon them in a number of very fine letters, which did not convince her. “How will you bear,” she writes to her, “the crosses that God will send you in the course of your life if a Norman or a Picard accent hinders you, or a man disgusts you because he is not as sublime as Racine? The latter, poor man, would have edified you could you have seen his humility during his illness, and his repentance for his search after intellect. He did not ask at such a time for a fashionable confessor; he saw none but a worthy priest of his own parish.” That example of the dying Racine did not work successfully. Mme. de La Maisonfort was one of those rare persons whom we see from time to time soaring to the summit of all the investigations of their epoch, supreme and refined judges of works of intellect, oracles and proselytes of the opinions in vogue. She could play charmingly at Jansenism with Racine and M. de Troisville, and distil Quietism with Fénelon, as in the eighteenth century she might have fallen in love with David Hume in company with the Comtesse de Boufflers, or in the nineteenth she would surely have shone in a doctrinaire salon discussing psychology and æstheticism, perhaps even going so far as the Fathers of the Church, not without adverting, as she passed, to socialism. Mme. de La Maisonfort, much as she was liked by Mme. de Maintenon, was, necessarily, dismissed from the Institute of Saint-Cyr.
Another mind, much better and much safer, that of Mme. de Glapion, was slightly affected by the new doctrines. “I have perceived,” Mme. de Maintenon writes to her, “the disgust you feel for your confessors; you think them vulgar; you want more brilliancy and delicacy; you wish to go to heaven by none but flowery paths.” Mme. de Glapion thought the Catechism rather grovelling and a little wanting in certain ways; it seemed to her ridiculous “that the master should put questions worthy of a scholar, and that the scholar should make the answers of a master.” She wished the question to be put by the child, who, after receiving the answer, should reason upon it and so be led from one investigation to another. Mme. de Glapion wished, as we see, to introduce the method of Descartes into theology. Mme. de Maintenon did not discuss the point; but she held up custom, experience, the impossibility of not stammering in such matters. “All those ideas,” she wrote to Mme. de Glapion, “are the remains of vanity. You do not like things common to all the world; your own mind is lofty, and you wish everything to be as lofty. Vain desire! The most learned theology cannot tell you more about the Trinity than you find in the Catechism. What you think and feel beyond that is a matter to be sacrificed; your spirit must become as simple as your heart. Employ your mind, not in multiplying your disgusts, but in conquering them, in concealing them until they are conquered, and in making yourself like the pleasures of your condition.” Mme. de Glapion succeeded in doing so. She was the consolation of Mme. de Maintenon and her truest inheritor; together with Madame du Pérou, she maintained at Saint-Cyr that spirit of precision and regularity combined with suavity and noble manners which distinguished the foundress, until long after the latter’s death. It may be said, definitively, that the persons of the generation at Saint-Cyr who had known and enjoyed Racine and Fénelon, and who remembered all of which they were cured, could alone realize the perfection of the education, the grace, and the language of Saint-Cyr; after them the essential virtues and the rules were kept, but the charm had flown, perhaps we may even say the life.
During these years of labour and tentative effort Mme. de Maintenon never ceased to visit, inspire, and correct Saint-Cyr; she went there once in every two days at least, remaining whole days whenever she could. She took part in the classes, in the exercises, in the smallest details of the establishment, thinking nothing beneath her. “I have often seen her,” says one of the modest historians quoted by M. Lavallée, “arrive before six in the morning in order to be present at the rising of the young ladies, and follow them throughout their whole day in the capacity of first instructress, in order to judge properly of what should be done and regulated. She helped to comb and dress the little ones. Often she gave two or three consecutive months to one class, observing the order of the day, talking to the class in general and to each member in private; reproving one, encouraging another, giving to all the means of correcting themselves. She had much grace in speaking, as in all else that she did. Her talks were lively, simple, natural, intelligent, insinuating, persuasive. I should never finish if I tried to relate all the good she did to the classes in those happy days.” Those “happy days,” that golden age, was the period of the start, the beginning, when all was not yet reduced to a code, when a certain liberty of inexperience was mingled with the early freshness of virtue.
Nevertheless, under the wise direction of the Bishop of Chartres, Mme. de Maintenon felt the necessity of giving to her enterprise less peculiarity than she had at first intended. It was decided that the “Dames institutrices,” while remaining true to the special object of their trust, should be regular nuns under solemn vows. Warned by the first irregularities and the fancies that she saw were dawning, she busied herself in making a rampart for her girls of their Constitution and rules. She understood, like all great founders, that we can draw from human nature a particular and extraordinary strength in one direction only by suppressing, or at least repressing, in all others. This final reform, this transformation of Saint-Cyr from a secular house into a regular nunnery, was completed between the years 1692 and 1694. The grave nature of Mme. de Maintenon is imprinted on every line of the little book addressed to the “Dames” and entitled “The Spirit of the Institute of the Daughters of Saint-Louis.” The first suggestion made to them is in terms as absolute as can well be imagined; nothing is ever to be changed or modified in their rule under any pretext whatsoever; solidity, stability, immovability is the vow and the command of Mme. de Maintenon—and the Institute remained faithful thereto to its last hour. The Institution was not founded, says the book, for prayer, but for action, for the education of young ladies; that is its true austerity; that is, as it were, the perpetual prayer, which needs only to be fed by other rapid and short prayers repeated often in the depths of the heart. “A mixture of prayer and action,” such was the spirit of the Institute. Mme. de Maintenon endeavours to forearm her girls against the perils they have already encountered. “Have neither fancy nor curiosity to seek for extraordinary reading and ragouts d’oraison.” “There is a great difference between knowing God through learning, by the point of the mind, by the subtlety of reason, by the multiplicity of studies, and knowing Him through the simple instructions of Christianity.” Between those lines I seem to read, “Above all, not much Racine and no more Fénelon.”
Truly, it was a high idea that the Dames de Saint-Louis were destined to bring up young ladies to be mothers of families and to take part in the good education of their children, thus placing in their hands a portion of the future of France and of religion. “There is,” says Mme. de Maintenon, “in this work of Saint-Louis, if properly done in a spirit of true faith and a real love of God, the wherewithal to renew throughout this kingdom the perfection of Christianity.”
The foundress reminds them in so many words that, being at the gates of Versailles as they are, there is no medium for them between a very strict or a very scandalous establishment. “Make your parlours inaccessible to all superfluous visits. Do not fear to seem a little stern, but do not be haughty.” She counsels a more absolute humility than she is able to obtain. “Reject the name of Dames [ladies] and take pleasure in calling yourselves the Daughters of Saint-Louis.” She particularly insists on this virtue of humility, which is always the weak side of the Institution. “You will preserve yourselves only by humility. You must expiate what there is of human grandeur in your foundation.” Recognizing these conditions of society, Mme. de Maintenon gives this advice to a young girl leaving Saint-Cyr for the world: “Never appear without the body of your gown (meaning in dishabille), and flee from all the other excesses common even to girls in the present day, such as too much eating, tobacco, hot liquors, too much wine, etc.; we have enough real needs without inventing others so useless and dangerous.”
In presence of a world that she knew so well, we must not think that Mme. de Maintenon tried to make tender plants, fragile women, ingenuously ignorant, with the morality of novices; she had, beyond all other persons, a profound sense of reality. She desired her “Dames” to speak boldly to their pupils on the marriage state; to show them the world and its divers conditions such as they are. “Most nuns,” she said, “dare not utter the word ‘marriage.’ Saint Paul had no such false delicacy, for he speaks of it very openly.” She was the first to speak of it as an honourable, necessary, and hazardous state. “When your young ladies have entered marriage they will find it is not a thing to laugh about. You should accustom them to speak of it seriously, even sadly, in a Christian manner; for it is the state in which we have most tribulations, even in the best marriage; they should be shown that three-fourths of all marriages are unhappy.” As for celibacy, to which too many young girls might be condemned on leaving the Institution, for lack of a dowry (“my greatest need,” she says jestingly, “is of sons-in-law”), she thinks it an equally sad state. In general, no one has ever had fewer illusions than Mme. de Maintenon. Speaking of men, she thinks them rough and hard, “little tender in their love when passion ceases to have sway.” As for women, she has very fixed views of them, which are but moderately flattering. “Women,” she says, “only half know things, but the little they do know makes them usually conceited, disdainful, loquacious, and scornful of solid information.” The education of Saint-Cyr, after its reform, had it always been carried out in Mme. de Maintenon’s true spirit, would not have sinned through too much timidity, weakness, and tender grace; its austerity was only veiled.
The reform once established at Saint-Cyr and the first sad impression effaced, all became orderly, and joy returned as before to a life so uniform and busy. Mme. de Maintenon had, as I have said, the gift of education, and she would have no sadness about it; there never can be sadness in what is done thoroughly with a full heart in the right way; at one moment or at another, joy, which is but the expansion of the soul, returns and cannot cease to flow through actions. Mme. de Maintenon relied greatly on recreations to form her pupils pleasantly, to show them their defects and win their confidence without seeming to be in search of it. In the good she felt she had done at Saint-Cyr she dwelt much on the pains she had bestowed on “recreation.” “That,” she said, “is what leads to union and removes partialities; that is what binds the mistresses with the pupils; a superior makes herself liked and warms the hearts of her girls by giving them pleasures; that is the time when edifying things can be said without repelling, because we can mingle them with gayety; many good maxims can be thrown out in jest.” She requires from the mistresses she has trained a talent for recreation as well as for teaching. “Make your recreations gay and free, and your girls will come to them.”
Louis XIV. at Saint-Cyr appears full of charm, of nobleness always, and sometimes with a certain bonhomie which he showed nowhere else. Under great events he intervened as king; when it was judged proper to reform the Constitution, he re-read it and approved it with his signature; when it becomes necessary to dismiss the recalcitrant mistresses, such as Mme. de La Maisonfort and some others, and to use for the purpose lettres de cachet, he, knowing that the heart of the other mistresses is wrung by this exile of their sisters, writes from the Camp at Compiègne to explain his rigour, and goes himself with a full cortège to the hall of the Community, where he holds a sort of lit de justice both regal and paternal. On his return from hunting he frequently came to find Mme. de Maintenon in this place of retreat, but never without taking time to put on, as he said, “out of respect to these ladies, a decent coat.” During the wars he remembers that he has at Saint-Cyr, in those young daughters of Saint-Louis and of the race of heroes, “warrior spirits, religious souls, good Frenchwomen;” and he asks for their prayers on days of disaster as on those of victory. He knows that they mourn with him, and that his glory is their joy. All this new and private side of Louis XIV. is very delicately and generously touched by M. Lavallée; at certain passages we are surprised to find ourselves as much touched as the great monarch himself.
Louis XIV. and Mme. de Maintenon believed in the efficacy of prayer, especially that of Saint-Cyr. “Make yourselves saints,” says the foundress to her daughters repeatedly throughout the long series of calamitous wars,—“make yourselves saints in order to gain us peace.” And towards the end, when a ray of victory returned, she mingles a sort of gayety with the solemnity of her hope. “It would be shameful in our Superior,” she writes, “if she could not raise the siege of Landrecies by force of prayers: it is for great souls to do great things.”
During the last years of Louis XIV. Mme. de Maintenon was happy only when she could go to Saint-Cyr, “to hide and comfort herself.” She said it again and again, under all forms and in all tones: “My great consoler is Saint-Cyr.”—“Vive Saint-Cyr! in spite of its defects one is better here than elsewhere in all the world.” She had tasted of all and was surfeited of all. In spite of her dazzling position, and at the very summit, apparently, she was one of those delicate natures that are more sensitive to the secret animosities of the world than to its grosser offerings. Surrounded at Versailles by men who did not like her and by women she despised, reading their hearts through their self-interested homage and cringing baseness, worn-out with fatigue and constraint in presence of the king and the royal family, who used and abused her, she went to Saint-Cyr to relax, to moan, to let fall the mask that she wore perpetually. There she was respected, cherished, and obeyed; when absent, her letters read at recreation were the pride of the one who had received them and the joy of all; when present, the mistresses and pupils concerted together to awaken her souvenirs and induce her to tell of her beginnings and the singular incidents of her fortune,—in short, to make her talk of herself; that topic to all of us so restful and so sweet. “We love to talk of ourselves,” she remarked, “were it even to say harm.” But she never said harm.
If it is painful, as she said in after years, to last too long, to live in a society of persons who do not know us or the life that we have led in former days, who are, in short, of another epoch, it is nevertheless very pleasant to retreat to a garden bench and find ourselves surrounded by fresh young souls, docile in letting themselves be trained, and eager for all that we will say to them. Do not let us analyze too closely the various sentiments of Mme. de Maintenon at Saint-Cyr; suffice it to say that the effect on all who surrounded her was fruitful and good.
The language of Saint-Cyr has a tone apart amid that period of Louis XIV.; Mme. de Caylus was the mundane flower of it. We feel that “Esther” has passed that way, and Fénelon equally. The diction is that of Racine in prose, of Massillon, shorter and more sober,—a school, in fact, all pure, precise, and perfect (to which belonged the Duc du Maine); a charming source, more sparkling on the side of the women, though rather less fertile. At first it promised greater things; and to one of the Dames de Saint-Louis (Mme. de Chapigny) Mme. de Maintenon was able to write: “I have never read anything so good, so charming, so clear, so well arranged, so eloquent, so regulated, in a word, so wonderful as your letter.”
At the death of Louis XIV. and under the harsh contrast with times so changed, Saint-Cyr passed, almost in an instant, to a state of antiquity and royal relic. After Mme. de Maintenon’s death worthy inheritors of her rule continued to maintain for a long time the culture of suavity and intelligence; but the Dames de Saint-Louis were faithful, above all, to the intention of their foundress in never making themselves talked of. Respected by all, little liked by Louis XV., who thought them, as was natural, too lofty and too worthy of honour, they vanish from sight in the continuance of duty and the uniformity of their quiet existence. A letter of Horace Walpole, who visits them as an antiquary, another from the Chevalier de Boufflers, are the only noticeable testimony that we have about them in the course of many years. When the revolution of ’89 broke out, the astonishment in that valley so close to Versailles was great, much greater than elsewhere. Saint-Cyr had made itself so completely immobile in its past that it fell abruptly from Mme. de Maintenon to Mirabeau.
From that time, after the abolition of the titles of nobility, there seemed no uncertainty except as to the precise day on which the Institution should perish. Nevertheless, the Dames de Saint-Louis made a long and placid resistance, which maintained them in their House till 1793; they accomplished and verified to the letter Mme. de Maintenon’s unconscious prediction when she said: “Your institution can never fail so long as there is a king in France.” It perished on the morrow of the day when there was no king.
But see and wonder at the linking of fates: Among the young ladies who were being educated at Saint-Cyr at that date was Marie-Anne de Buonaparte, born at Ajaccio, January 3, 1771, and received at the Institution in June, 1784. Her brother Napoléon de Buonaparte, an officer of artillery, observing that after August 10 the decrees of the Legislative Assembly seemed to announce, or rather to confirm, the ruin of the house, went to that house on the morning of September 1, 1792, and took such active steps towards the mayor of the village and the administrators of Versailles that he was enabled on the same day to take away his sister (of whom he was the guardian) and carry her to his family in Corsica. He was destined not to return to Saint-Cyr, converted by him into a French Prytaneum, until June 28, 1805, when as Emperor and master of all France he gazed—an equal to an equal—on Louis XIV.
In 1793 the devastated Saint-Cyr lost for a time its very name, and the ruined village was called Val-Libre. In 1794, while persons were converting the church into a hospital, the tomb of Mme. de Maintenon was discovered in the choir, broken open, the coffin violated, and her remains insulted. On that day, at least, she was treated as a queen.
[Mme. de Maintenon was a voluminous letter-writer; many hundreds of her letters are published, the most interesting of which are those to the Princesse des Ursins. Her style is simple, easy, and dignified; not graphic nor lifelike; she seems too rounded into her own mind and views to be a good general observer; nor is she guided in her judgment of others by a perception of their feelings, unless they are reflected by her own. This remark does not apply to the Saint-Cyr letters; in those she is genuine, she is writing on a topic that fills her heart and opens it to others. Saint-Cyr was an episode in Mme. de Maintenon’s life, and as such it can be placed here with some completeness. The last chapter of this volume contains a few miscellaneous letters bearing more especially upon the character and career of the Duchesse de Bourgogne, which Sainte-Beuve asserts can only be truly known through the letters of Mme. de Maintenon to the Princesse des Ursins.
The pupils of Saint-Cyr were divided into four classes named and distinguished by the colour of their ribbons. Class Red (the youngest) were from seven to ten years of age; class Green from ten to fourteen; class Yellow from fourteen to seventeen; class Blue from seventeen to twenty. Certain young ladies of class Blue were detailed as head monitors and wore black ribbons; other monitors selected from classes Blue and Yellow wore flame-coloured ribbons. The classes were divided into bands or “families” of ten. Each class had a head mistress and three sub-mistresses; there were also two mistresses for the postulants or novices, two for the infirmary, others for the various departments of the house, and a mistress-general for the whole school. These mistresses were called “Dames de Saint-Louis” and were under vows; they were recruited by postulants selected from class Blue; the Superior was chosen by election among themselves from their own body. Mme. de Brinon, the first Superior, who came with the school from Rueil and Noisy, was an Ursuline nun.
After Mme. de Brinon, the Dames de Saint-Louis who were most relied upon by Mme. de Maintenon were: Mme. du Pérou, mistress of the novices at twenty years of age, afterwards elected many times as Superior; Mme. de Fontaines, mistress-general, also frequently elected Superior; and Mme. de Glapion, called the “Pearl of Saint-Cyr,” who seems to have been Mme. de Maintenon’s most trusted friend, to whom she made personal confidences. Many letters and “talks” addressed to these ladies and others at Saint-Cyr have been published, from which those that here follow are selected.]
To M. l’Abbé Gobelin [her confessor].
Chambord, October 10, 1685.
I am very glad that you are satisfied with what you have seen at Noisy, and you will give me very great pleasure by going there again before the cold weather; but I would like you to confess, or at any rate converse in private with, all those who desire to enter our community. I have sent word to Mme. de Brinon to examine them all, and to begin nothing for the novitiate until my return. [This refers to the selection of mistresses, not pupils, for the establishment on its removal to Saint-Cyr.]
When you go again, I beg you to make a few familiar exhortations to the whole community. I approve, with you, that these ladies should make a year’s trial, but it seems to me that it would be more useful if, instead of shutting them up to learn the rule and only know their obligations by speculation, they were to spend that year in performing the duties they will afterwards have to fulfil; above all, those of governing and instructing children, which is the foundation of the Institution.
I know well that this must not be done so exclusively that they will have no time for prayer, orisons, silence, acts, and conferences; but a mingling might be made which would make known to others, and also to themselves, of what they are capable. Concern yourself about this affair, I beg of you, inasmuch as you hope it may be useful; since God and the king have laid it upon me, you ought to help me to acquit myself well.
Humility cannot be preached too strongly, both in public and in private, to our postulants; for I fear that Mme. de Brinon may inspire them with a certain grandeur which she has herself, and that the neighbourhood of the Court, this royal foundation, the visits of the king and mine, may give them the idea of being chanoinesses, or important persons; which would not fail to swell their hearts, and counteract strongly the good we are seeking to do. All the rest is going on, it seems to me, very well; there is a very solid piety in the house; but we must take a medium course between the true splendour of our devotion and the puerilities and pettiness of convents, which we have tried to avoid. I do not yet know by what name the community will be called. If you have read the Constitution you will have seen that Mme. de Brinon calls them “Dames de Saint-Louis.” But this could hardly be, for the king would not canonize himself, and it is he who will name them when founding them. [They were so named, however.] They wish to be called Dames to distinguish them from the young ladies; send me your opinion on this. As for their costume, it must be black, of a shape now worn, but without hair, or any adornment; such, I think, as Saint Paul demands for Christian widows. Adieu; write to me, I entreat you, whenever you can do so without inconvenience.
To Mlle. de Butéry [pupil-mistress at Noisy].
January, 1686.
I am very glad to be in communication with you, Mademoiselle, and I judge by the office Mme. de Brinon has given you that she thinks you have much benevolence and exactitude. You can address yourself to me for all your wants, asking, however, only for those it is impossible to avoid having; for as you will have everything new at Saint-Cyr you must be patient at Noisy. When you write to me again, leave rather more interval between your lines, that I may correct your orthography on days when I have leisure; the best way of learning to spell is to copy books. Your handwriting is very handsome, and I see with pleasure that several of the novices write very well. I am now going to correct your letter, but I shall not finish mine without assuring you of my esteem and friendship.
Take care to notice the difference between my corrections and what you have written; for that is how you will learn better.
To Mme. de Brinon.
June, 1686.
They are working hard about Saint-Cyr. Your Constitution and rules have been examined; they have been admired, cut down, and added to. Pray God that he will inspire all those who touch them. I must inform you of a visit I have received from the king this morning; he is none the better for it; still we were delighted to see him out of his room. [Louis XIV. had lately undergone a surgical operation.] He has corrected the choir of Saint-Cyr, and several other parts; the young ladies are to be placed on four benches as at Noisy; therefore we must again change the colours. He talked yesterday with the controller-general about the foundation, and all will be settled soon. One never has all good things at once; proximity to Versailles will give you many advantages and as many restraints; praise God for all things. I shall go, please God, to Noisy next Sunday and give you an account of all that has then happened.
Rejoice, my very dear; you are spending your life for God and a great work.
To the Dames de Saint-Louis.
August 1, 1686.
God having willed to use me to assist in this establishment which the king undertakes for the education of poor young ladies in his kingdom, I think I ought to communicate to the persons destined to bring them up what my experience has taught me about the means of giving a good education; to do that is assuredly one of the greatest austerities that can be practised, because there is no other without some relaxation; whereas in the education of children the whole life must be employed upon it.
When the object is merely to adorn their memories, it suffices to instruct them for a few hours a day,—it would even be a great imprudence to burden them longer; but when we seek to form their reason, waken their hearts, elevate their minds, destroy their evil inclinations, in a word, make them know and love virtue, we must always be at work, for at all moments opportunities present themselves. We are just as important to pupils in their amusements as in their lessons, and we cannot leave them for a moment except to their injury.
As it is not possible that a single person can conduct a large number of children, it will be necessary to have several mistresses for each class; but they must act together in great union and with the very greatest uniformity of sentiments; their maxims must be alike, and they must endeavour to instil them with the same manners.
In this employment, more than in any other, there is need to forget one’s self entirely; or, at least, if any credit is hoped for it must only be after success, using the simplest means to obtain it. When I say that we must forget ourselves I mean that we must aim only to make ourselves understood and thus convince; eloquence must be abandoned, for that may attract the admiration of listeners; it is even well to play with, children on certain occasions and make them love us in order to acquire a power over them by which they will profit. But we must make no mistake as to the means we may use to make ourselves loved; none but upright intentions will draw down the blessing of God.
We should think less of adorning their minds than of forming their reason; this system, it is true, makes the knowledge and ability of the mistresses less apparent; a young girl who knows a thousand things by heart will shine in company and gratify her relatives more than one whose judgment has been formed, who knows how to be silent, who is modest and reserved, and is in no haste to show her cleverness.
It is right to let them sometimes follow their own will in order to know their inclinations, to teach them the difference between what it good, what is bad, and what is indifferent. I think that all persons who give themselves the trouble to read this will know as well as I what is meant by indifferent things. Give them, for instance, one companion in place of another; a walk in one direction rather than in another, a game or other trifles, to let them see we are only mistresses when we must be, and that they might be so themselves in all things if they were reasonable. A companion may be dangerous, a walk may have some impropriety, a game may be out of place; but I wish that in refusing them they be told the reason, as far as prudence will allow, trying always to grant them frequently what they want, in order to refuse what is bad with a firmness that never yields. It is wonderful how much such methods make governing easy and absolute.
It is good to accustom them to have nothing granted to importunity.
You must be implacable on vices, and punish them either by shame or by chastisements, which must be very rigorous, but as rare as possible.
Guard yourselves from the dangerous principle of some persons who, out of a scrupulous fear that God will be offended, avoid all occasions when children’s inclinations can appear; we cannot know too much about them in order to inspire a horror of vice and a love of virtue, in which we should confirm the young by giving them principles which will prevent their going wrong through ignorance. We should study their inclinations, observe their tempers, and follow their little contests in order to train them in every way. For experience shows us only too well how often faults are committed without knowing it, and how many persons fall into crime without being more wicked than others who live innocently.
They should be taught all the delicacies of honour, integrity, discretion, generosity, and humanity; and virtue should be described to them as being both beautiful and agreeable, as it is. A few little stories suited to this purpose will be very proper and useful,—amusing, yet all the while instructing them; but they must be convinced that if virtue does not have religion for its basis it is not solid, and God will not sustain it, but will rebuke such pagan and heroic virtues, which are only the result of susceptible pride insatiable for praise.
It is not necessary to make long disquisitions on such matters; it is better to place them as occasions occur.
You must make yourselves esteemed by the children; and the only means of doing so is not to show them defects; for it is hard to believe how intelligent they are in perceiving them. The study to appear perfect in their eyes is of great utility to ourselves.
Never scold them from ill-humour, and never give them reason to think there are times more favourable than others to obtain what they want. Treat fine natures with affection, be stern with bad ones, but harsh with none. Make them like the presence of their mistresses through amiable kindness, and let them do before you exactly what they would do if left alone.
We should enter into the amusements of children, but never adapt ourselves to them by childish language or puerile ways; and as they cannot be too reasonable, or too soon be made so, we should accustom children to reason from the moment they can talk and understand,—all the more because they will never reject the healthy amusements we give them.
The external accomplishments of foreign languages and the thousand other things with which young ladies of quality are expected to be adorned have their inconveniences; for such studies are apt to take time which might be more usefully employed. The young ladies of the house of Saint-Louis ought not to be brought up, more than can be helped, in that way; because, being without property, it is not well to uplift their hearts and minds in a manner so little suitable to their fortunes and state of life.
But Christianity and reason, which are all that we wish to inspire, are equally good for princesses and paupers; and if our young ladies profit by what I believe they will be taught, they will be capable of sustaining all the good and all the evil that God may be pleased to send them.
To Mme. du Pérou.
October 25, 1686.
I am convinced of your zeal and your capacity; and both must be employed for our dear house. It is true that I am very keen for all its interests; I think I sometimes go as far as impatience; but it seems to me that there are reasons why we should hasten, and use well the favourable moment in which we now are. God knows that I never thought to make so grand an establishment as yours, and that I had no other view than to do a few good works during my lifetime; not feeling myself obliged to do more, and thinking that there were already too many nunneries. The less part I had in this plan, the more I see in it the will of God; which makes me love it much more than if it were my own work. God has led the king to found this school, as you know, although he does not like new institutions.
It is true that just as much as I should have trembled in governing Saint-Cyr had it been my own work, so much on the other hand do I find myself emboldened by the sense that it is done by the will of God, and that that same will has laid this duty upon me. Therefore I can say to you with truth that I regard it as the means God has granted me for my salvation, and that I would sacrifice my life with joy to make it glorious. What is now urging me on, sometimes perhaps too eagerly, is the desire I have that all should be firmly established before the death of Mme. de Brinon, my own, and that of the Abbé de Gobelin, so that the spirit of the house may always last, in spite of oppositions it may meet with in the future. You will never have an abler or more commanding Superior than Mme. de Brinon, a friend more zealous for the house than I, a director more saintly than the one you have now.
We have, moreover, all authority, temporal and spiritual, in our hands. The king and the bishop [Godet of Chartres] are ready to do all that we desire; it is for us to put things in that state of perfection in which we desire them to remain forever.
In examining your girls [for the novitiate] seek for true piety, an upright mind, the liking they may have for the Institute, the desire they have to be useful, their attachment to the rules, their spirit of community, their detachment from the world; these are the principal things for a Dame de Saint-Louis. As for tempers a little too quick, remember that we all have the vices and virtues of our temperament; that which makes us hasty makes us active, vigilant, eager for the success of what we undertake; that which makes us gentle makes us nonchalant, lazy, indifferent, slow, insensible; piety rectifies both in the long run, and surely that is the essential thing. Who can be hastier than Mme. de Brinon and I? but do you love us less? You will tell me, perhaps, and with reason, that subordinates suffer from such tempers; to that I reply that everybody has to suffer; and, after all, you will only have such Superiors as you elect yourselves. But while I excuse hasty people (from self-love perhaps), I exhort you to correct that disposition as much as you possibly can in your novices.
You can show what I write to you to whom you please; would to God it were good enough that all might draw some profit from it.
To a young lady in class Blue.
December, 1690.
I have heard of your disobedience to Mme. de Labarre, and I have stopped the punishment they intended to give you. How can you suppose that we should allow such rebellion? What exception could there be to our rules? Do you think yourself necessary because you have a fine voice? Can you know me and yet think that the representation of “Athalie” goes before the regulations established at Saint-Cyr? No, certainly not; and you will leave the establishment if I hear anything more about you. Submit, if you wish to remain; but, if you wish to leave, it will be more honourable to you to do so by agreement with me than to get yourself dismissed. You are lax and cold towards God; it is that which makes you fall into all these faults. Reflect, I beg of you, on what you might hope of yourself on the occasions which you will find to fail. You are becoming grown-up; this is the time to make serious reflections. It is for God, my dear child, to touch your heart, but it is for us to rule your conduct. You will be very unhappy if it is good only externally. I wished to give you this advice before punishing you, and I hope that you will give me the joy of seeing you profit by it; I ask this of you with all my heart; for I am as sorry to have to treat you with rigour as I am resolved to establish in your class an absolute obedience to the regulations.
To Mme. de Fontaines.
September 20, 1691.
The pain I feel about the daughters of Saint-Cyr can only be relieved by time and by a total change in the education we have given them up to this time. It is very just that I should suffer because I have contributed to the harm more than any one; I shall be happy if God does not punish me more severely. My pride has been in everything concerning the establishment; and its depth is so great it carries the day against my own good intentions. God knows that I wanted to establish virtue at Saint-Cyr, but I have built on sand,—not having that which alone can make a firm foundation. I wanted that the girls should have intelligence, that their hearts should be uplifted, their reason formed. I have succeeded in my purpose: they have intelligence, and they use it against us; their hearts are uplifted, and they are prouder and more haughty than is becoming in the greatest princesses—speaking as the world thinks; we have formed their reason, and we have made them disputatious, presumptuous, inquisitive, bold, etc. Thus it is that we succeed when the desire of excelling [shining] makes us act. A simple, Christian education would have made good girls, out of whom we could have made good wives and good nuns; we have made beaux-esprits, whom we ourselves who made them cannot endure: there is our blame, in which I have a greater share than any one.
Let us come to the remedy; for we must not be discouraged. I have already proposed some to Balbien [Mme. de Maintenon’s waiting-maid mentioned in “Saint-Simon” as Nanon]. They may seem to you rather petty, but I hope, by the grace of God, they will not be without effect. As many little things have fomented pride, so many little things will subdue it. Our girls have been too much considered, too petted, too often deferred to. They must now be ignored in their classes; they must be made to keep the rules of the day; and little else must be talked of. They should not be forced to feel that I am angry with them; it is not their grief that I want; I am more to blame than they; I desire only to repair by another line of conduct the harm that has been done. The best girls have done more to show me the excess of pride which we must now correct than the bad ones; I have been more alarmed at seeing their self-conceit and the arrogance of Mlles. de ——, de ——, and de —— than at all that I have heard of the insubordinate members of the class. These are girls of good intentions who wish to be nuns, but with that desire they have a language and manners too proud and haughty to be tolerated at Versailles among young ladies of the highest rank. You see by this that the evil has sunk into their natures, so that they are not themselves aware of it. Pray God, and make others pray that He will change their hearts, and give us all humility. But, madame, do not discourse to them too much. All Saint-Cyr is turning to discourses; much is said there just now of simplicity; they seek to define it, to comprehend it, to discern what is simple and what is not; and then in practice they say: “Out of simplicity, I take the best thing; out of simplicity I praise myself; out of simplicity I want something at table that is far away from me.” Truly, this is turning into ridicule all that is most serious. We must now correct in our girls that turn for witty satire which I myself have given them, and which I now see to be opposed to simplicity; it is a refinement of pride that says in jest what it dares not say openly. But, once more, do not talk to them of pride or satire; we must destroy all that without fighting it, by stopping the use of it; their confessors will talk to them of humility better than we. Do not preach to them,—try that silence that I have so long urged upon you; it will have more effect than all our words.
I am very glad that Mlle. de —— has at last humbled herself; let us praise God for it, but do not praise her; it is another of our faults that we have praised too much. Do not irritate their pride by too frequent corrections; but when you are obliged to make one, do not admire the girl who is corrected for taking it properly.
As for you, my dear daughter, I know your intentions; you have, it seems to me, no personal blame in all this; it is only too true that the great harm has come from me; but take care, with the others, to have no part in that pride which has been so firmly established everywhere that we are scarcely conscious of it. We wanted to avoid the pettiness of certain convents, and God has punished our assumption. There is no house in the world more in need of external and internal humility than ours: its situation so near the Court, its grandeur, its wealth, its nobleness, the air of favour that pervades it, the attentions of a great king, the care of a person of influence, the example of vanity and manners of the world which she gives you in spite of herself by force of habit,—all these dangerous traps ought to make us take measures quite the contrary of those we have hitherto taken. Let us bless God for having opened our eyes. It is he who inspires your piety; it will daily increase; but establish it solidly. Let us not be ashamed to retract; to change our fashions of acting and speaking; and let us ask our Lord fervently to change our hearts within us, to take from our house the spirit of loftiness, of satire, of subtlety, of curiosity, and of freedom in judging and giving our opinion about everything, and of meddling in the duties of others at the risk of wounding charity. Let us pray also that He will take from us that prevailing over-delicacy, that impatience of small inconveniences; silence and humility are the best means. Show my letter to our Mother Superior; all must be in common among us.
To Mme. de Radouay (mistress-general of the classes).
Marly, 1692.
Do not be disturbed by the complaints made to you [by the mistresses] of your children; think only of training their hearts to piety, integrity, simplicity, candour, sincerity, honesty, and courage, and you will one day see, if it pleases God, that they are far removed from the children you now write of.
Do not notice all the faults of the Yellows and Blues; have patience; all will come right in time, and the sisters will be better convinced by their own experience than by anything we can say to them. As for what you have done about silence, nothing could be better. I only beg you, as I have already said, to preach it without expecting to fully obtain it. You will never succeed in keeping sixty girls together without a word from one of them. You must see things as they are, and not attack a small infringement like a vice. Regularity and silence are necessary for the quiet, the order, and the propriety of the house; but the essential part of the education of your girls is that they shall bear with them and always practise the virtues I have named to you. Those virtues do not show to persons who merely see a march in the choir or a silent recreation in the class-room; but it is this sincerity of purpose that I ask of you; God will reward it magnificently.
I should be afraid to write all this to certain of the Dames, who, with very good intentions, pass from one extreme to the other at the least word said to them, and who on the strength of this letter would cease to attend to regularity or silence; but I hope that you at least will understand me better.
I have been without news from Saint-Cyr for several days. The king is well, I am very well, but the Prince of Orange is ill.
To one of the mistresses.
Marly, 1692.
When you wish to know anything, madame, it is better that I should write it to you than say it, because it is then impossible that either of us should forget it. I am at your service for whatever you want; and I will now repeat what I think I have already said to you.
You must punish as seldom as you possibly can, and for this reason you must not see all faults. But when you cannot ignore those you have seen, you must not pardon them if they are considerable, or if they have already been pardoned. It is now a question of bringing the young ladies to a footing of perfect obedience. To this you must apply yourself seriously, without, however, searching out those faults that you could ignore....
Get it into your mind, once for all, that there are few circumstances in life without their drawbacks, and that you must choose the side that has the least. You must also distinguish clearly those that disturb order and the public good; that is what we must especially avoid in communities.
Yes, madame, you will have the necessary courage if you ask it of God, if you act in His presence and for Him solely; or I should better say, if you forget yourself entirely, without thinking whether you will be loved or hated. If you punish without prejudice, without listening to your repugnances or your inclinations, if you can think that you please God, whatever you do, and are conscious that you seek good only without respect to persons,—if you govern with those dispositions, as I do not doubt you will, our Lord will govern with you. Pray to Him, I implore you, for those who are guiding you.
To Mlle. d’Aubigné [her niece, a pupil at Saint-Cyr].
Chantilly, May 11, 1693.
I love you too well, my dear niece, not to tell you all that I think will be useful to you, and I should be very lacking to my obligations if, being wholly occupied with the young ladies of Saint-Cyr, I neglected you whom I regard as my own daughter. [The child was only nine years old at the time this letter was written.] I do not know if it is you who inspire the pride your companions have, or whether it is they who have given theirs to you; however that may be, rely upon it that you will be intolerable to God and men if you do not become more humble and more modest than you are. You take a tone of authority which will never be becoming in you, happen what may. You think yourself a person of importance because you are fed and lodged in a house where the king comes daily; but the day after my death neither the king nor all those who caress you now will look at you. If that should happen before you are married, you will have a very poor country gentleman for a husband because you are not rich; and if during my life you should marry a greater seigneur, he would only consider you, after my death, as long as your humour was agreeable to him; you would be valued only for your gentleness, and of that you have none. Your mignonne [term used in those days for an attendant on girls] loves you too much, and does not see you as other people see you. I am not prejudiced against you, for I love you much, but I cannot see without pain the pride that appears in all you do. You are assuredly very disagreeable to God; consider His example. You know the Gospel by heart; and what good will such learning do you if you are lost like Lucifer? Remember that it is solely the fortune of your aunt that has made that of your father and yourself. You allow persons to pay you a respect that is not due to you; you will not suffer being told that it is only paid on my account; you would like to raise yourself above me, so proud and lofty are you. How do you reconcile that puffed-up heart with the pious devotion in which you are being brought up? Begin by asking of God humility, contempt for yourself,—who are, in truth, nothing at all,—and the esteem of your neighbours. I speak to you as if you were a great girl because you have a very advanced mind; but I would consent with all my heart to your having less, and therefore less presumption.
If there is anything in my letter that you do not understand your mignonne will explain it to you. I pray Our Lord to change you so that I may on my return find you modest, humble, timid, and putting into practice what you know to be right. I shall love you much more. I conjure you by the affection you have for me to work upon yourself and to pray daily for the graces of which you are in need.
To M. l’Abbé de Bisacier [special confessor at Saint-Cyr].
September, 1694.
The mother of the Demoiselles de —— has been beheaded; I shall always reproach myself for not following up that case with a care which might have saved the life of the poor creature. God has disposed otherwise. I am awaiting you before announcing this sad news to the two daughters. I am requested to consult the king on sending them away from Saint-Cyr. He does not understand any more than I do why this crime should be visited on the children, and I conjure you to reflect still further upon it with the Bishop of Chartres and the Abbé Tiberge. They say that the Jesuits would not admit to their Society in a like case, nor the nuns of the Visitation either. If that spirit comes from Saint Ignatius or Saint François de Sales, I submit to it without repugnance, but if it is only the effect of human wisdom or the harshness of communities, I desire with all my heart to escape it in this case. The father of M. de Luxembourg was beheaded; but they confided to the latter the person of the king and his armies. We saw M. de Rohan die upon the scaffold some twenty years ago, and all his family were in offices round the king and queen, and receiving condolences on the event without its entering the head of a single courtier to speak against them. What! shall worldly decency go farther than charity? Shall we fail to give our pupils the true ideas they ought to have on all things? I am told that in the classes these girls will meet with less respect and be exposed to reproaches: I should put that act among the most punishable of faults; girls with proper hearts would be incapable of it; the others must be corrected....