BOOKS.

WE have in a former article told the story of Francoise d'Aubigue's life, from her birth in the conciergerie of Niort, till her marriage with the first King in Europe. We propose, in the present paper, to discuss very briefly a few of the chief political events upon which hoe influence is supposed to have been decisive, and we shall then endeavour to confirm our estimate of her character by extracts from the immense collection of letters and papers, which relate to her brother's family, and to the affairs of the great community she founded and endowed.

St. Simon shall again bring the indictment. With such an. accuser, it can lack neither animosity nor fire:—

"Los suites, les sucebs, Fentiere confianee, in rare dependance, in toutmpuissance, Federation publique universelle, le s ministros, les generaux d'armee, in famine royale la plus procbe a sos plods ; tout bon ot tout bien par elle, tout reprouve sans cue; les hommos, lea affairos, les choses, les choix, les justices,,les graces, in religion, tout sans exception on sa main, et le Rd i et l'Etat sos victimos ; quelle elle fat oette fee incroyable, et comment elle gonverna sans lacuna, sans obstacle, sans nuage he plus leger, plus de tronte ens option', et memo trentmdeux ; o'est Fincomparable spectacle gull s'agit do so ro- tracer, et qui a 6te colui de tante l'Europo."

M. Lavallde would persuade us that Madame de Maintenon's influence was not so great as is usually supposed. He admits that she played an important part in the affairs of Europe, through the Princesse des Ursius, but he altogether under- estimates the force of that steady pressure which her position enabled her to exercise on the King, and which St. Simon has exerted all his art to depict. She was the one constant factor in the polities of the palace. Whether the Minister has the genius of a Louvois or the muddled incapacity of a Chamillard, he must take count of the old woman who sits silently in the corner, bent over her tapestry, seldom offering a remark, apologising for her ignorance when called on for an opinion, but ever ready to make or mar a reputation or a career by a well-timed sentence, a word of faint praise, or a hearty commendation, aimed, as she alone could aim it, straight to the heart of the master. She had, in fact, the power which some theologians attribute to the Devil. She could not foresee

the future, but she had an unrivalled experience of the past, which enabled her to act as though she did. "Cola serait bona, placer," she writes to Cardinal de Noailles, of some story against the Jesuits, " quaud vous voudrez qua je lravaille a lear mine."

It is idle to argue in the face of such evidence. That one sentence is enough to confirm the indignant outburst of St.

Simon. We have the method explained in a word, the con- fidence given by repeated successes in a line. Is the historian justified in his bitter denunciation of the use made of this power ? He tells us she was uncertain and fickle in her favour, and she confirms the charge herself. "Ii no font jamais s'abandonner, ii faut Otre toujours mattress° de soi," she writes, in one of the little pieces composed for St. Cyr, "ii faut pr6voir l'avenir ; cette intime amio vous manquera, pent-Otro," ezc. " Mee. vous de tout cc que vous estimez le plus," is her advice to a friend. "Mon naturel," she continues, " ne me porta it la. d6fianee mais la cour change les meillenrs." She was but in one thing

constant ever, and that was to favour the " preeisians " of the Court, the men from whom Pascal, Mellen), and La Bruyere have drawn the portraits which will serve as model hypocrites so long as the French tongue exists. "Lea d6vots no sont bons it rien," she quotes scornfully from Pere La Chaise. We

think the good Jesuit was right, and that " d6votion," as " ddvotion" was understood by the contemporaries of Onuphre, is a real impediment to the conduet of a State. "Elle cut la foiblesse d'être gouvern6e par In confiance, plus encore par lee espbces do confessions, et d'en Otre la dupe, par la cloture oit elle s'etoit renferm6e. Elle out aussi la maladie des directions.

Elle se eroyoit l'abbesse universelle Elle so figuroit Iltre uno mbre de l'tglifie." Of the definite charges against her, that which, in England at all events, has been most widely spread and most generally believed, is that she instigated the King to revoke the Edict of Nantes. She had, we believe, little or nothing to do with that disastrous measure. Her letters prove that she would never have approved the means by which it was enforced. Louis and his

• (Bums de Madame de Maktenon. Mee on Cornmeataire et des Notes. Par Tbdophtle Lavallde. Paris Charpentler. an progress.) wife were alike kept in the dark as to the worstbarbarities exercised on his wretched subjects, "II faut quelquefois tromper le Roi pour le servir," was a maxim practised by others as well as the writer. "Il faut a.ttirer les gens par la douceur," she says,—" Jesus- Christ lions en a montrd l'exemple ;" and years later, "No corrompez pas lee mceurs en prdchant la doctrine." In 1697, it is true, she wrote a Memoir against the repeal of the penal laws ; but it is a sensible State-paper, whatever we may think of the conclusions, and the use of force is expressly deprecated. Her action in the case of her own Protestant relatives is less easy to excuse, but the resistance of the de Villettes was not very obstinate, and that of the Chevalier de Ste. Hemline won her respect. " L'dtat du Chevalier de Ste. Hernaine," she writes, "eat deplorable, mais ii n'a rien de honteux, et celui de ceux qui abjnrent sans etre vdritablement Catholiques eat infante." Mine. de Maintenon is also accused of urging Louis to acknowledge the Pretender as James III., and of thus causing the war of the Spanish succession. This charge is very likely true, but we do not think the worse of her character as a woman for allowing compas- sion for another to over-ride her political judgment. The same ex- cuse will partially defend her conduct in pressing the dying King to exalt the rank and power of the royal bastards. For the Due du Maine she felt a deep and real love ; and it is usually thought no great wrong to her sex, to say that justice is the least womanly of virtues.

We have followed M. Lavallde's arrangement in treating of the political side of Madame de Maintenon's character, as far as might be, by itself. We shall now endeavour to complete the portrait by a few touches from her private letters, hundreds in number, and mostly quite uninteresting and worthless, but all treasured up by the loving hands of the Dames de St. Louis, and all, alas ! printed in this too complete edition.

Like all clever rulers, Madame de Maintenon preferred to govern by persuasion rather than authority. " Je voudrois bien Irons persuader, et pour rien an monde je ne voudrois vous forcer," she writes to her brother. The substance, without the show of power flatters her in private, as in public life. We have often thought that it is in this point chiefly that St. Simon has misread Madame de Maintenon. He tells us that twice she exerted all her power to have her marriage with the King pro- claimed ; that twice she was foiled by the honesty and devotion of his advisers, and that she pursued with undying hatred those who had thus thwarted the great purpose of her life. It is pre- sumption, perhaps, to hint a difference with so great a student of mankind, but is it not more consistent with what we know of Madame de Maintenon to suppose that her ambition was alto- gether above the pomp and circumstance of royalty ? We are told that when she refused a groat place about the Court, she called her niece to her, and asked "whether she would prefer to be niece to one who would accept or refuse such a post." "A quoi," continues Madame de Caylus, " je rdpondis sans balancer, quo je trouvois calk qui refulioitinfiniment au-defisus de l'autre ; of Madame de Maintonon, contente de ma reponse, neembrassa." We believe that the same motives restrained any desire on her part to be acknowledged as Queen, with the loss of solid power which such a step must have entailed. It is curious that she, who was so easily led by pretended confessions, and letters from ruined gamesters and demoisellee (her favourite sinners are always noble, like Tartufe) of battered reputation and small means, should have constantly taught her pupils to trust nobody. "No confiez rien qui puisse vous nuire, s'il est redit," is an oft-repeated lesson. Yet she was known to be false her- self, though rather from necessity and habit, than from her natural disposition. She betrays a secret to Cardinal de Noailles, and tells him that she does so, "because she thinks it necessary !" Her biographers are fond of insisting on her droitwre ; we agree with St. Simon in thinking that her pride was by no means in- compatible with falsehood, on occasion. "II no faut jamais rompre avec personne," is not the maxim of a straightforward mind. Coupled with this lust of power for its own in sake, and in curious contrast with her true love of children, is her indiffer- ence, harshness almost, in relation to all family ties. She had never had a home, and she felt neither regret nor scruple in breaking up those of others, Not only does she advocate over and over again the strict enforcement of that cruellest of the French penal laws, which deprived the unhappy Protestants of their children,that they might be brought up by nuns and priests in what was to them an odious creed, not only did she employ a hateful fraud and the tyranny of lettres de cachet to secure the Custody of her own nephews and nieces, and withdraw them from the rightful authority and control of their heretical parents ; but she had her own brother's only child, sent to her to be edu- cated, in a case where there could be no question of religion, as 'both the parents were Catholics. "Jo sons une grande peine," she coolly writes on this occasion, "do cello qu'aura Madame' d'Aubign6, en perdant tout son plaisir et son amusement." As to this same unlucky sister-in-law, she bullied her without mercy. The poor creature had, the misfortune to be the. daughter of parents in the middle rank of life, and her " noble " sister undertook to " form " her. She sets her women as spies on the poor child, she scolds her, and makes her little presents when she approves her conduct. She writes of her to her husband in terms of the coarsest abuse five days after their marriage. She corrects her vanity by telling her to her face that she is plain, she interferes with her amusements, with her dress even, and urges her husband to accustom her to live alone,. and pass her time in working and reading good books. " Mena,cez- la de moi," she writes; "elle rne itaira,peut-6 tre, me& ii n'importe; je serai eontente, si elle eat une honnete personne." Charming picture of family life, in that "age of chivalry," when, as we are told, woman was loved and reverenced with a noble gallantry forgotten in these degenerate times. This spoilt girl is handed over at fifteen to the tender mercies of a ruined debauchee of forty, and his sister dares to write to him in this strain a few days after their union ! When will this nonsense about "the good old times" cease P But Madame de Maintenon is quite as ready to drill her brother, as her brother's wife,— with the allowances, of course, duo to a man and a gentleman,. to the worthy son of the cheat and ravisher who rotted for years in the prisons of Niort. Such a gentleman would, in these democratic days, have quickly found his way to the tread- mill, where he might, perhaps, have been cured of the melan- choly "do bel air" from which the ill-used hero suffered. Such an officer would even then have come under the hands of a court-martial, had it not been for the exalted position of his sister. She reproaches him for refusing to pay for his shirts, and for immoderately fleecing the burghers of the Flemish towns he governed, and advises him never to extort more from the " fermiers " for whom she had got concessions than was consistent with his honowr. But the tender sister does not confine her loving counsel to such important matters as these. She is instant with him to keep his footmen's clothes, so that should he discharge them he may be able to take back the liveries. She calculates the number of candles which should be con- sumed in his house, not forgetting to allow for the ends saved ; she bids him get his table-linen marked, and have a care that it is not changed in the wash, And she is proud of all this mean- ness, this eternal prying and meddling in other people's affairs; these hours spent in writing on the price of sugar, and the best way of making an old dish of fruit look fresh! How St. Simon would have revelled in these letters, had he known them, how con- firmed he would have been in the charge of " baseesee" he brings against the " vieille f6e." And yet very likely he would have been mistaken. It is not, perhaps, so much a petty avarice which inspired these curious passages, as the same love of domination which led the writer to strive for and to win the hand of Louis. We verily believe that the absolute rule of her brother's household, or of her convent of St. Cyr, gave this strong and narrow intellect a fuller satisfaction than all her in- fluence at Court. She loved her Court favour, as increasing the sphere of her power, but she can never have enjoyed there the uncontrolled dominion which most gratified her pride.

In her charities we see the same spirit, the same desire to govern in every detail the vast establishment she founded, the same- resolve to brook no will but her own, and the same strong common-sense, which, even when we dislike her most, must ever wring from us a real admiration for this woman we cannot love. Her charity was great and noble, perhaps the greatest and noblest of all charities, the education of the poor ; but Madame de Maintenon is always an aristocrat, and so the poor must be poor of four descents, to enter at St. Cyr. There is something revolting to us in this mixture of Christian piety and pride of rank.

" Qui d'une amide vie embrasse l'innocence, No dolt point taut pr6ner sou nom at sa naissance,"

says Dorine, in the play which, somehow or other, the mention of Madame de Maintenon always suggests. Well, this devote is always reminding the young ladies of St. Cyr that they are demoiselles, and that they owe it to their birth to live honourably and in good repute. The lessons given are ex- cellent, and show the ripe knowledge of a corrupt society which we should have expected from this Ulysses in petticoats of the Court of Louis XIV. This very confidence in the power of "mixed motives" shows no small knowledge of character,—of character, that is, of the average kind, for of the depths of a strong nature Madame de Maintenon is no judge. When heart- broken and deserted, the woman who alone loved Louis with a true woman's love, who had prized her honour and felt the bitter shame of losing it, who had loved her God and sinned in fear and sorrow, when the gentle La Vallihre, after enduring neglect and insult from her lover and the taunts of a pitiless rival, resolved at last to devote herself to a penance as public as her sin, in the severest Order of the Catholic Church, Madame de Maintenon took upon herself to advise the poor lady not to pass too suddenly from the splendours of the Court to the austerities of a Carmelite convent, but to retire to the cloister, unbound at first by vows, there to try if she could persevere in such a life. " Seroit-ce Th une penitence P" was the answer of the penitent. If she had sinned, yet she loved much, and like the souls in Dante's purgatory, longed for the suffer- ing which was to prove her love. Passion like this Madame de Maintenon could neither feel nor understand, either in its weak- ness or its sublime strength. But she knows how to teach the young Duchesse de Bourgogne to love good works "en flattant son amour-propre," and to give the " bleues " a lesson in -economy by pointing out how much better a plain and neat -dress looks than tawdry finery. It is a capital working code, no doubt, only it jars strangely with the maxims of exalted piety which are so frequently mixed with it. It seems as though Madame de Maintenon would like her pupils to be good through high religious motives, but that from long experience this veteran courtier knew the weakness of unsupported virtue in face of the enemy, and so is always ready to hurry up a. strong reserve of worldly prudence. Fenelon, in an interesting letter, which shows at once his thorough appreciation of the nature he had to do with, his desire to speak plainly, and his fear of giving offence, puts his finger on the weak point when he tells his correspondent that she has never ceased to seek herself in her religion. "Au reste," he goes on, "il faut tellement sacrifier h Dien le mei qu'on no le recherche plus, la pour la reputation, ni pour la consolation du temoignage qu'on se rend a, soi-memo sur sea bonnes qualites ou sur sea bons sentiments." Madame de Maintenon never learnt the lesson herself, and habitually preaches the "temporal dispensation" to others. But if we turn from the moral aspect of Madame de Maintenon's views of education to her ideas on the physical treatment of children, we shall find what an immense benefactress of the human race this sensible old woman has proved. We have neither space nor materials to develope such a comparison at present, but we would recommend all who take an interest in the history of education to study for themselves the every-day life of Madame de Maintenon's pupils at Rad. and St. Cyr, and then compare the discipline there observed with that practised in other schools of the same date. The rules for the pensionnaires of Port Royal, where there was certainly no wish to be cruel to children, drawn up by Pascal's sister, a most tender and noble- hearted woman, will give some notion of what a child's life was made to it in "the good old times." The only character in Which Madame de Maintenon becomes really lovable is as a schoolmistress. Her first foundation at Rueil was chiefly for poor children, and to do her justice, she loved and tended them as carefully as ever she did the young ladies of St. Cyr; but in the end, the greater and more aristocratic esta- blishment swallowed up the less. Her children are to be well fed ; to have as much bread as they can eat ; this she insists on several times. They are to be warmly clad, in uniform, if possible, for Madame de Maintenon loves order in all things ; but if the expense would be great, she will be content with a partial one,—as that all the girls should wear the same head- dress and aprons, or handkerchiefs of the same cut and colour. She wishes them to be gaily dressed, and indeed this element of brightness and cheerfulness is a leading feature in her scheme of education. "Jo trouve lea tabliers noires bien lugubres," she writes to Madame de Brinon, " donnons-leur de serge bleue on verfe." St. Cyr was brilliant with light, and colour, and song. Madame has a hearty contempt for "lee miseres et petitesses des convents" She wishes her dear children to grow up to be " personnes raisonnables." They are to live in the world, and accordingly even their school-frocks are to be cut in the fashion, and their " coiffure " to be that of the day. When the so-called " reform " took place at St. Cyr, she thought it very hard that "lea tailleurs " were henceforth excluded. We find muslins, and ribbons, and even " uu bord de deutelle," as part of the uniform. Nay, pearls and " cordelibres " were not unknown. The education was as unconventual as the dress. " Une piete solide, eloignee de toutes les petitesses de convent, une libert6 entibre dans nos conversations, un tour de raillerie agreable dans la societe, de l'616vation dans notre piete, et un. grand mepris pour les pratigues des autres masons." The young ladies read Moller° and Soudery ; the religious world held up its hands in holy horror. There was a reaction for a time, but the blow had been struck ; a new ideal rose before the world, and the sable throne of Ignorance and Routine received a shock from which it will never recover. Madame is always writing little notes to Madame de Brinon. Now it is to beg a holiday, now to announce a sudden visit, and to ask "quo l'on fusse quelque petit regal l nos Scours de la Charite, and que je lee voie diner en bon ordre." When the children were ill, she sends M. Fagon, the .first physician in Europe, to prescribe for them, and a whole list of curious reme- dies for their disorder. When they are well, she despatchea by bearer " un pot de benne et huit de confitures ;" but the careful soul begs to have her jam-pots returned, and the " demoiselles " are to get twice as much jam as the little peasants, for is not noble blood to be respected in all things ? No wonder the children were free with her, as she boasts with pardonable pride. She had a special fondness for the naughty girls. "Jo no hale pas trop," she says, "co qu'on appelle de mechants enfants, c'est-h-dire, enjoues, glorieux, vifs, un pen volontaires et thus, parceque ces Maids se corrigeut par la. raison et la piete." However, they won't got those rosaries they are so anxious for, if they are not "plus sages qu'elles no le furent lundi Pheure de l'ouvrage." They must have been better behaved when Madame wrote to the schoolmistress, " N'avez-vous point de phtissier 11, Noisy on Bailly pour leur faire ge,gner quelque chose, quand on veut donner in collation is vos enfants ?" The woman who habitually wrote and thought in this strain cannot have been altogether bad and heartless, as her enemies would have us believe. It is in trifles like these, where there can be no hope of publicity and no desire to deceive, that we can best discern the natural working of Madame de Maintenon's heart. " Ces choses qui semblent des liens, et qui front des riens en effet, caracteiisent trop pour lea omettre." This pregnant sentence from her arch foe must be our apology, and with it we close our article on One of the most interesting characters in modern history.