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Dromo's Den
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[Up] [Dromo's Den] Marquise de Maintenon Biography Maintenon, Françoise d'Aubigné; Marquise De (1635-1719). Mistress and second wife of Louis XIV. She was the daughter of Constant d'Aubigné and of Jeanne de Cardillac, and granddaughter of Théodore Agrippa d'Aubigné, the famous Protestant champion. She was born Nov. 27, 1635, in the prison at Niort, where her parents were then incarcerated. On obtaining their release, her parents went to Martinique, where the father died in 1645. After her father's death, Françoise returned to France with her mother, after whose death her father's sisters took her under their care and educated her in a convent, where her conversion to the Roman Catholic religion was accomplished at the age of about 14. When she was 16 she became acquainted with the poet Scarron (q.v.), who, struck by her beauty, intelligence, and helpless condition, offered her his hand, or, if she should prefer it, a sum of money sufficient for her entrance into a nunnery. Although Scarron was lame and deformed, she chose to marry him, and lived in the midst of the intellectual society which frequented the house of the poet. On his death in 1660 she was reduced to great poverty; but through the intervention of Madame de Montespan (q.v.) obtained a pension from the King. In 1669 she was intrusted with the education of the two sons whom Madame de Montespan had borne to Louis XIV, and in this capacity attracted the attention of the King by her excellent intellectual gifts, finally supplanting Madame de Montespan in the changeable monarch's regard. War between the two women resulted in the triumph of the new favorite. The King bestowed on her the sum of 100,000 livres, with which she bought the estate of Maintenon and in 1675 received the title of marquise, and from that time to the end of his life she exercised an extraordinary ascendancy over him. She had become an ardent Catholic and exerted a powerful religious influence over the King, and although keeping herself in the background was able to direct foreign policy and internal affairs in the interests of clericalism. She favored the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, but was opposed to the violent persecutions that followed it. Louis privately married her in 1684, soon after the death of the Queen, and, though she was never publicly acknowledged as his wife, her position at court was quite different from that of her predecessors in the favor of the King. She carefully brought up the children of Madame de Montespan; and it was at her instigation that Louis legitimatized them. When he died in 1715 she retired to the former abbey of St. Cyr, which, at her wish, had been chanced 30 years before into a convent for young ladies. Here she died, April 15, 1719. The New International Encyclopaedia, Vol. XIV (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1920) 692-693. |