purpose required it; and we can imagine his delight on hearing the powerful Voltaire's early comment on their appearance before the literary world: Fortunately these letters 'confirm what I have said of her. Had they not done so, 'my work was lost.' Voltaire himself, the great historian and critic, lent La Beaumelle's inventions the authority of his name, judgement, and approval. That authority was quite sufficient to secure the popularity of the book, even though Voltaire might pertinently inquire: How is it that a certain La Beaumelle, preacher at Copenhagen, 'since academician, buffoon, gambler, rascal, possessed of cleverness however, has been the possessor of such a 'treasure?'

Voltaire's astonishment was perfectly justified, for in 1752 neither the memoirs of St. Simon, nor those of Madame de Caylus, nor those of the Maréchal de Noailles had yet appeared. The memory of Madame de Maintenon, as Lavallée observes, was still tainted by the calumnies of the 'Dutch writers of fiction, by those with which the pamphlets of the Protestants teemed, and by those of which the songs ' at Court were full. No one dared or ventured to take her 'part. Even her own family preferred keeping silent to 'encountering public opinion.' Much had to be done before the chaff could be separated from the wheat. Voltaire had grasped the fact, and had, by the aid of a few documents, made an admirable beginning. He had understood how necessary it was for the historian to discover such authentic and undoubtedly genuine documents as would set aside for ever the utterances of a Princess Palatine which hatred and jealousy alone had suggested, or those of a Duc de St. Simon which could only be the reflection of the envy of disappointed courtiers; but he could not make out how a total stranger like La Beaumelle should have become possessed of valuable and apparently genuine documents which he himself had been unable to procure. He therefore set to work to find out, and was able very soon to write: 'I 'always had a notion that this La Beaumelle had stolen. those letters. He is the most audacious scoundrel I ever knew.'

A copy of La Beaumelle's book fell into the hands of Louis Racine, who had not much difficulty in recognising his own property, which however had considerably increased in bulk since it left his hands. He therefore carefully perused the work, and became at once aware that his manuscripts had been grossly tampered with. He made an infinite

number of marginal notes, and this copy, in the possession of the Noailles family, has proved the basis of that rehabilitation of a great character upon which so many have now worked, and few more successfully than M. Geffroy, the able author of the volumes under consideration.

In Racine's copy of La Beaumelle's edition of the letters there are marginal notes showing that out of 298 letters published only 163 have a claim to qualified authenticity; that sixty letters addressed to Madame de St. Géran, Madame de Frontenac, and Madame de Fontenay were pure inventions, and that seventy-five others were wholly unknown to Louis Racine, who had never heard of them. As an illustration of La Beaumelle's trust in the credulity of his readers, M. Geffroy justly points out that Madame de St. Géran was exiled in 1697 on account of her light conduct; and that it seems, if it were not even actually proved to be so, an impossibility that a prudent, wise, and religious woman like Madame de Maintenon could have selected so frivolous a person to confide to her the secrets of her intercourse with the King, when it is known and regretted that she took such immense pains to obliterate every trace of her exalted position as his wife. In an authentic letter to the Duc de Noailles, Madame de Maintenon writes: Madame de St. Géran, with 'whom I had not spoken for years, requested an audience, 'assuring me that she intended to reform. I spoke to her with great frankness as to her conduct.' Yet, asks M. Geffroy, are there two or three books at the utmost which in the present day abstain from heaping on Madame de Maintenon calumnies invented by La Beaumelle? and has not the time arrived when safe and authentic information should be furnished to the historian of an epoch wittily described as ' plus célébrée que connue'? or an end be put as concerns Madame de Maintenon to vague and uncertain opinions, mostly founded on shameful falsifications of facts, which still command ridiculous credence?

Such an object is of course desirable, but can it be obtained? The only letters that could help the historian are said to be destroyed. All her correspondence with Louvois, with the Duc du Maine, with M. le Rageois, with Madame de Montespan, with the King, appears to be hopelessly lost, and all that remains bears upon her private relations with her personal friends. Had M. Geffroy attempted a complete biography on the very lines he sets forth, he would have made a valuable present to the world; whereas a choice selection of letters, in order that the reader may find presented

6

to him all the aspects of a character more varied than is generally believed,' only makes the reader wish that more ample materials were before him.

We would gladly also have hailed a less apologetic tone when speaking of the two great events in Madame de Maintenon's life: her acceptance of the charge of Madame de Montespan's children on conscientious grounds, and her supplanting that lady in the King's affections. Though a great character, she was yet a woman; and to our mind one of the chief charms of her letters is that they all betray a little feminine weakness amidst a flood of wisdom.

*

The blot upon her memory is undoubtedly her presumed fanaticism in the persecution and conversion of the Huguenots. M. Geffroy's defence of her action appears to us very weak-weaker even than Voltaire's somewhat satirical exclamation, Why do you tell me that Madame de Maintenon had much to do with the revocation of the Edict of Nantes? 'She had no part in it at all. That is a certain fact. She 'never dared contradict Louis XIV.' For while he insists on her great influence for good upon the King, and shows that imperiousness was not foreign to her character in some of the aspects of it, which he is anxious to present to our eyes, he does not exonerate her otherwise than by casting blame on St. Simon. After she embraced the Catholic religion she undoubtedly professed it with undiscriminating fervour and intolerance. Yet it is curious to remark how much of the austerity of the Huguenot party clung to her throughout life, and perhaps embittered her feelings against her former friends.

Madame de Maintenon's life is soon told, and no one can describe it more tersely than Ste.-Beuve.

'She was thrown young and poor into the world, with no gifts but beauty and her title of demoiselle. Exposed in childhood to the persecutions of bigoted people-who found it difficult to convert her-she became later on, as the wife of the libertine Scarron, the object of the attention of very great people, who were altogether unable to seduce her.' †

The misery of her early life, the severe religious training she received at the hands of her Huguenot aunt, the ridicule she saw herself exposed to, though young and pretty, as the wife of such a buffoon as Scarron, all acted powerfully on her sensitive nature, and created in succession a feeling of gratitude to those who showed her kindness, a desire to tPremiers Lundis.'

January 17, 1753.

return the kindness when she had the power, and, when age and opportunity had disappeared, an anxious wish to leave the world behind her. This feeling existed in the same degree in regard to her spiritual conduct: gratitude to God for coming safely out of her worldly troubles, a wish to make others feel the same gratitude, and, lastly, an overwhelming desire to die in a state of grace and quiet preparation for the world to come. The misery of her early days made her appreciative of kindness received and of the value of kindness bestowed. The use of religion as a consolation in affliction, coupled with the strict Calvinistic notions of respect, propriety, and reverence she imbibed in her early education, led her practical mind to cultivate piety as a necessity of humanity, while her upright nature coloured the necessity with the halo of self-sacrifice in return for never-ending benefits. Her whole life was spent within these lines, and it is interesting to mark them in the letters before us. It is psychologically interesting to note how at every age her powers of observation were keen, just, and direct; how at all times she was scrupulously attentive to les convenances;' how after her secret marriage she was able, by a close attention to small details, to hide the equivocal nature of her own position. Her life, as Ste.-Beuve says, 'was one long fight against herself; her 'prudence was never at fault; her devotion to her husband's will amounted to superstition;' and the fear of displeasing her great benefactor made her reticent where a word from her lips might have saved Racine from disgrace. That word also might have irritated her husband; she could not bring herself to pronounce it. All this does her honour; but if she could be submissive to authority she insisted on submission where she was the one to command. If she was taught to be pious, she would teach others to be the same; if she had to practise economy, she would preach economy. And therein lies a special feature not specially noticed before in her character, that no experience did she ever learn that she did not immediately turn to instructive account.

Granddaughter of Agrippa d'Aubigné, the celebrated Calvinistic companion of Henry IV., and daughter of Constant d'Aubigné, whose gambling propensities and debauched habits caused him to be disinherited by his father, Françoise d'Aubigné was born in the prison of Niort in 1635. Although baptised a Catholic, she was educated by her Huguenot aunt, the Marquise de la Villette, previously to going out to Martinique; though her letters scarcely ever refer to a

period when her mother was so harsh to her that she scarcely remembered her kissing her more than twice.' In 1647 she arrived with her widowed mother at La Rochelle, where they remained a few months living on alms; and in so reduced a condition were they that Françoise and her 'brother Charles took it in turns to go to the Jesuits' college and bring back from it a little meat or a little soup.'

In 1648 we already have proof of her grateful heart, for having successively passed from the hands of a Catholic aunt, Madame de Neuillant, into those of the nuns of Niort, and thence back to her mother in Paris to the Ursuline convent of St. Jaques, Françoise d'Aubigné appeals to her Huguenot aunt De Villette to have pity on her present condition. The memory of the singular favours you were 'pleased to shower on poor little abandoned creatures makes 'me supplicate you to get me away from this place, life in it being worse than death.' She was not taken away, but, at her request, a Catholic priest and a Protestant minis'ter having been brought together in the parlour of the 'convent to discuss theological questions before her,' she gave her vote to the Catholic priest and became a Catholic.

In 1650 her mother died, and in May, 1652, she married Scarron, who had known her at Martinique, who had guessed that the little girl with too short a dress, and who cried on seeing him, was as clever as she looked;' who, when she became an orphan, had offered to pay the money necessary to place her in a convent, or to marry her, though he was forty and she was only sixteen, and who, notwithstanding his looks, the absurdity of his personal appearance, and the coarseness of his jokes, was a well-known literary personage, and the architect of her great good

fortune.

M. Geffroy remarks on the strange circumstance that no authentic documents tell us anything of her life during the years of her marriage, when, however, she must have become known and appreciated, and laid the foundations of those great acquaintances which served her so well thereafter. Indeed, in 1660 she must have been already well known, to be asked to witness the triumphant entry into Paris of Louis XIV. and his queen, Marie Thérèse, from the balcony of the Hôtel d'Aumont, in company with the Queen 'Dowager, the Queen of England, Princess Henrietta, Car

Père Laguille, Archives littéraires de l'Europe,' vol. xii. (1806),

p. 363.