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Ch. 11: The Duchess of Orléans, Pt. 2 · Women of Versailles: The Court of Louis XIV

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  Section fifteen of Women of Versailles, The Court of Louis the fourteenth by our
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  tour Leon Ambert de Saint Ament, translated by Elizabeth Gilbert Martin. This librovox
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  recording is in the public domain. Read by Pamel and Agami, Chapter eleven,
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  The Duchess of or Leon, Part two. The theological discussions which occupied
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  so much space at court did not awaken the slightest interest in the princess.
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  On this head, she writes, all they tell us about the other world
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  is incomprehensible. It seems to me impossible to comprehend what God does with us,
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  and that we ought to confine ourselves to admiring His omnipotence without desiring to
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  argue about His goodness and justice. The beautiful and touching ceremonies of Catholicism,
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  the long sermons, the protracted offices did not greatly please Madame I think.
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  She writes that Monsieur is a devitee, and that he resembles Henry the Third
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  in every way. If this is the road to heaven, I shall certainly
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  never enter it. Seeing that I find it impossible to hear a high mass.
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  I get through with my devotions very expeditiously, for I have a chaplain
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  who hurries through his Mass in a quarter of an hour, which just suits
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  me. In plain chant, she detested what she described as an eternal naming
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  of the vowels, and referring to it, she said, very often,
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  if I dared, I would run out of the church. So insupportable as
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  this to me. I like Doctor Luther for having composed some fine hymns,
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  and I am persuaded that it has given many people the notion of becoming Lutherans,
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  for those hymns have something gay about them. Madame, who was very
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  observant, analyzed and described the various kinds of piety exhibited by the courtiers.
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  In matters of devotion, I see that everyone follows his inclination. Those who
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  like to babble want to pray a good deal. Those who are generous by
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  nature always give alms. Those who are choleric and easily annoyed are constantly in
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  transports and want to kill everybody. Those, on the other hand, who
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  are gay, think they can serve God very well by rejoicing in all things
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  and being annoyed by nothing. In short, devotion is for those addicted to
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  it a touchstone which discovers their natural inclinations. For my part, I think
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  the worst devities are the ambitious ones who simulate devotion in order to rule,
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  and who claim to render a great service to God by subjecting everything to their
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  power. The most supportable are those who, having been very amorous, when
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  they once take God for their object, think of nothing but speaking to him
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  affectionately, and leave everybody else at peace. What shocked Madame was not religion,
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  which she respected, but the hypocrites who used it as a mask.
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  Her indignation was not directed against the faith, but against the rising flood of
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  skepticism, and we credit her with sincere grief when she wrote in sixteen ninety
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  nine, the faith is so extinct in this country that one hardly finds a
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  single young man who does not wish to be an atheist. But what is
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  stranger still is that the same individual who turns atheist at Paris plays the devitee
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  at court. It is claimed also that all the suicides which have been so
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  frequent lately are caused by atheist. With such an opinion of the courtiers,
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  it is easy to understand how badly off the Princess Palatine must have found herself
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  among them. German to the end of her fingernails. She suffered when obliged
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  to live beside the enemies of her country, and the conflagrations of the Palatinate
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  seemed to her infernal flames. This court, which played and danced while the
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  palaces and cabins of Germany were burning, became to her an object of horror.
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  The unhappy people who were expelled from their homes, robbed, despoiled,
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  maltreated. The ruins of Heidelberg, Manheim, Anderdach, Baden, Rastadt,
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  speia Wums were constantly in her mind, pursued as by phantoms. She was
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  a prey to patriotic despair and anguish, and felt herself a prisoner in the
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  splendid palace of their side. There is something touching in her plaints. Were
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  it to save my life, it is impossible for me not to regret being
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  so, to say, the pretext for the ruin of my country. I
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  cannot look on coolly while they destroy it a single blow. And that poor
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  Mannheim, all that cost the late Prince elector my father so much toil and
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  trouble. Yes, when I think of all that has been ruined there.
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  It fills me with such horror that every night, as soon as I begin
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  to fall asleep, I seem to be at Heidelberger Monheim, beholding the ravages
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  that have been committed. Then I start up wide awake, and it takes
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  me more than two hours to go to sleep again. I fancy how it
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  all was in my time, and to what condition it has been reduced to
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  day. I consider also in what condition I am myself, and I cannot
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  avoid weeping bitter tears. The Princess found few with whom she sympathized. In
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  this large and brilliant court. She admired neither the men, the women,
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  nor the things that figured there. Everything displeased and annoyed her. The figure
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  of the King, whom she somewhat ironically called the Great Man, was the
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  only one that seemed to her majestic, And even on that sun she discovered
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  many spots. Her family afforded her no satisfaction. She had the sorriest opinion
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  of her husband, who was incessantly occupied with futilities, masquerades, and cynical
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  intrigues. One of her letters, written in sixteen ninety six, contains this
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  curious passage Monsieurs says openly, and he had not concealed it from either his
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  daughter or me, that as he is beginning to grow old, he has
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  no time to lose. That he will do everything and spare nothing to amuse
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  himself up to the last. That those who survive him will know how to
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  spend their time after their own fashion. But that he loves himself better than
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  me or his children, and that in consequence he intends, so long as
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  he lives, to attend to no one but himself, and he acts as
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  he talks. Madame was not more happy in her son, the future Regent,
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  than in her husband. The judgment she passed on this son, who
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  wilfully spoiled the fine qualities he had been endowed with by nature, justifies that
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  of Louis the fourteenth. On this boaster of vices, fant feren De vises,
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  although his inclinations are in reality serious, she writes, and he does
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  not take kindly to debauchery, he yields to it solely to imitate others.
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  And that what annoys me most of all. If the pleasure were in his
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  nature, I should not have much to say against it, but that he
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  should do violence to himself in order to take to vice and talk twaddle,
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  while at the same time he hides everything that is good in him. This
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  is what I cannot endure without pain. The Princess Palatine had a horror of
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  illegitimate births, and her pride was outraged by the rank occupied at court by
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  the daughters of Louis the fourteenth and Madame de Montespont, whom she detested,
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  to use her own expression as being the bastards of a double adultery, the
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  children of the worst and most abandoned woman that the earth can bear. Hence,
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  when her son consented to marry one of these bastards, she was so
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  enraged as to give him in the gallery of their sille, that vigorous and
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  resounding slap in the face which re echoes so plainly in Saint Simon's memoirs.
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  She wrote in seventeen hundred, my son has caused me much grief in addition
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  to his marriage. What I find worst in his conduct is that I am
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  the only one who cannot have his friendship, For with that exception, he
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  is good to everybody, and yet I have only lost his friendship by always
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  advising him in his own interest. At present I have taken my stand.
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  I say nothing more to him, and speak to him as I would to
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  the first comer of indifferent things. But it is a very painful thing not
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  to be able to open one's heart to those one loves. Inwardly, tormented
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  and exasperated by her husband's favorites, saddened as a wife, a mother,
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  and a German, Madame cared little for the splendors of Versailles and Saint clud
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  where her existence was a blending of luxury and poverty. Certainly, said she,
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  I would attach great value to grandeur if one could have all that should
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  accompany it, plenty of gold, for instance, in order to be magnificent,
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  and the power to assist the good and punish the wicked. But to
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  have only the name of grandeur without the money, to be reduced to the
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  strictest necessaries, to live under perpetual constraint, without its being possible to have
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  any society. This seems to me, in truth, perfectly insipid, and
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  I care nothing whatever about it. I should prize more a condition in which
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  one could amuse one's self with good friends, without the troubles of grandeur,
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  and do with one's property whatever one pleased. How did the Princess Palatine continue
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  to divert herself from so many worries and cares by hunting and writing? The
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  chase and still more the epistolary style. These were her two passions, her
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  two manias. From sixteen seventy one, the year of her marriage, to
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  seventeen twenty two, the year of her death, she never stopped writing letters
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  to members of her German family. On Mondays, she wrote to Savoy,
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  on Wednesdays, to Modona Thursdays and Sundays to Hanover. But this rage for
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  scribbling was fatal to her. Notwithstanding, her correspondence, opened at the post
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  office, was sent to Madame de Mantinon, who showed the imprudent Princess a
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  letter full of the most outrageous insults one can fancy, says Saint Simon,
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  whether at this aspect and this reading Madame did not think of dying on the
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  spot she began to cry, and Madame de mantinean to represent modestly to her
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  the enormity of every part of this letter, and in a foreign country too.
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  The best excuse for Madame was to own up what she could not deny
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  pardons, repentances, prayers, promises. Madame de Mantinon coldly enjoyed her triumph
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  for some time, letting the princess choke over her words, weep and try
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  to take her hands. It was a terrible humiliation for so arrogant and proud
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  a German. Nothing more is needed to explain the hatred of the Princess Palatine
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  for her, to whom in her rage she applied the old German proverb,
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  where the devil cannot go himself, he sends an old woman. Madame quieted
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  down when she became a widow in seventeen o one. No convent, said
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  she the day after Monsieur died. Let no one talk to me about a
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  convent. Happy to remain at court in spite of the ill things she had
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  said about it, she softened toward Madame de Mantonan sufficiently to write in seventeen
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  twelve, although the old woman is our most cruel enemy. Still I wish
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  her a long life, for everything would go ten times worse than it does
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  if the King were to die now, he has loved this woman so much
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  that he certainly would not survive her. Therefore, I hope she may live
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  for many years. Madame ended her days like a good Christian, and Massillon,
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  in a beautiful funeral oration rendered due homage to the courage she had displayed
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  in her last sufferings. To those who surrounded her death bed, she had
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  said, with a calmness worthy of Louis the fourteenth, we shall meet again
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  in heaven to sum up. Madame, the Duchess of Orleon, is a
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  very strange type, but she demands attention, whether or no, in her
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  uprightness and good sense. Justice and humanity coexist with great caprices in her letters.
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  Amidst a mass of insignificant details, more or less inexact anecdotes, commonplaces,
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  and worldly gossip, there are thoughts worthy of a moralist, and judgments
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  that bear the stamp of wisdom. It is true she preached morality in cynical
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  language, but if she speaks of debauchery, it is only to stigmatize it
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  and depict its shamefulness. She has at least the merit of seeing vice as
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  it is, of looking it in the face, of detesting it with a
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  warlike, aggressive, irreconcilable hatred, of stigmatizing it in Rabelasian accents, whose
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  triviality renders them more striking than fine hum For that matter, are not crudities
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  of language and audacities of expression less dangerous than certain refinements of half mystical,
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  half sensual poesy, which, by confounding the alcove with the oratory, envelop
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  voluptuousness in a cloud of incense. End of Section fifteen.