Maintenon, FRANÇOISE D'AUBIGNÉ, MARQUISE DE, famous for her connection with Louis XIV., was the daughter of Constant d'Aubigné, the worthless son of the famous Huguenot, Théodore Agrippa d'Aubigné, and was born in the prison at Niort, November 27, 1635. When four years old she was carried to Martinique in the West Indies, whence she returned after her father's death in 1645 to France. Her conversion to the Roman Catholic religion was effected not without difficulty, and on her mother's death she found herself at fifteen reduced to absolute penury. Soon after this she became acquainted with the kind-hearted poet Scarron, who offered either to marry her himself or to pay the money required for her entrance into a nunnery. Although Scarron was lame and deformed, she chose to marry him, and for nine years lived contentedly in the midst of the intellectual society which frequented the house of the poet. On his death (1660) she was again reduced to great poverty; but Anne of Austria continued and increased her husband's pension. On her death (1666) it was discontinued, and she was about to go as a governess to Portugal, when Madame de Montespan obtained for her the continuance of her pension. In 1669 she was given the charge of the king's two sons by Madame de Montespan, and in this capacity displayed a patient tenderness and sleepless care that no mother could have surpassed. By 1674 she had made sufficient money to buy the estate of Maintenon, and four years later had it made a marquisate by the king. She had now completely established her ascendancy over the heart of Louis, who made her in 1680 second lady-in-waiting to the dauphiness. The queen died in 1683, and Madame de Maintenon, who had become first lady-in-waiting to the dauphiness the year before, married the king privately in the winter of 1685. Her morals were severe, for her heart was never other than cold, and she knew that the best cards for her game were propriety, orthodoxy, and the church. Her moral influence over the court would have been greater had she filled a more recognised position. Her political influence was supreme in all but the more important questions of policy, and she lavished her patronage upon persons devoted to herself. She was a liberal patroness of letters, and, while she had a high reputation for orthodoxy, had too much humanity to approve of the detestable dragonnades. Yet in the midst of splendour, and in the possession of great power, she was unhappy, and she often turned for solace to the home for poor girls of good family she had established at
St Cyr, and for which she laboured with the most ceaseless care. Hither she retired when the king died in 1715, and here she died, April 15, 1719. Her pretended Mémoires (6 vols. 1755) are spurious, but her delightful and admirable Lettres (9 vols. 1756) are genuine. By far the best editions are by T. Lavallée (1854-56) and M. Geoffroy (2 vols. 1887).
See the books by Madame Suard (1810), Lafont d'Aussonne (1814), and the Duc de Noailles (1848-58); also Théophile Lavallée's Histoire de St Cyr, and its review in vol. viii. of Sainte-Beuve's Causeries du Lundi; the studies by Cotter Morison (1885) and Emily Bowles (1888); vol. ix. of Scherer's Études sur la Litt. Cont., and Döllinger in Allgemeine Zeitung (1886).