Ch. 11: The Duchess of Orléans, Pt. 2

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Section fifteen of Women of Versailles, The Court of Louis
the fourteenth by our tour Leon Ambert de Saint Ament,
translated by Elizabeth Gilbert Martin. This librovox recording is in
the public domain. Read by Pamel and Agami, Chapter eleven,
The Duchess of or Leon, Part two. The theological discussions

(00:25):
which occupied so much space at court did not awaken
the slightest interest in the princess. On this head, she writes,
all they tell us about the other world is incomprehensible.
It seems to me impossible to comprehend what God does
with us, and that we ought to confine ourselves to
admiring His omnipotence without desiring to argue about His goodness

(00:49):
and justice. The beautiful and touching ceremonies of Catholicism, the
long sermons, the protracted offices did not greatly please Madame
I think. She writes that Monsieur is a devitee, and
that he resembles Henry the Third in every way. If

(01:11):
this is the road to heaven, I shall certainly never
enter it. Seeing that I find it impossible to hear
a high mass. I get through with my devotions very expeditiously,
for I have a chaplain who hurries through his Mass
in a quarter of an hour, which just suits me.
In plain chant, she detested what she described as an

(01:32):
eternal naming of the vowels, and referring to it, she said,
very often, if I dared, I would run out of
the church. So insupportable as this to me. I like
Doctor Luther for having composed some fine hymns, and I
am persuaded that it has given many people the notion

(01:54):
of becoming Lutherans, for those hymns have something gay about them. Madame,
who was very observant, analyzed and described the various kinds
of piety exhibited by the courtiers. In matters of devotion,
I see that everyone follows his inclination. Those who like

(02:14):
to babble want to pray a good deal. Those who
are generous by nature always give alms. Those who are
choleric and easily annoyed are constantly in transports and want
to kill everybody. Those, on the other hand, who are gay,
think they can serve God very well by rejoicing in

(02:34):
all things and being annoyed by nothing. In short, devotion
is for those addicted to it a touchstone which discovers
their natural inclinations. For my part, I think the worst
devities are the ambitious ones who simulate devotion in order
to rule, and who claim to render a great service

(02:58):
to God by subjecting everything to their power. The most
supportable are those who, having been very amorous, when they
once take God for their object, think of nothing but
speaking to him affectionately, and leave everybody else at peace.
What shocked Madame was not religion, which she respected, but

(03:20):
the hypocrites who used it as a mask. Her indignation
was not directed against the faith, but against the rising
flood of skepticism, and we credit her with sincere grief
when she wrote in sixteen ninety 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 stranger still is that the same individual
who turns atheist at Paris plays the devitee at court.
It is claimed also that all the suicides which have
been so frequent lately are caused by atheist. With such

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an opinion of the courtiers, it is easy to understand
how badly off the Princess Palatine must have found herself
among them. German to the end of her fingernails. She
suffered when obliged to live beside the enemies of her country,
and the conflagrations of the Palatinate seemed to her infernal flames.

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This court, which played and danced while the palaces and
cabins of Germany were burning, became to her an object
of horror. The unhappy people who were expelled from their homes, robbed, despoiled, maltreated.
The ruins of Heidelberg, Manheim, Anderdach, Baden, Rastadt, speia Wums

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were constantly in her mind, pursued as by phantoms. She
was a prey to patriotic despair and anguish, and felt
herself a prisoner in the splendid palace of their side.
There is something touching in her plaints. Were it to
save my life, it is impossible for me not to
regret being so, to say, the pretext for the ruin

(05:12):
of my country. I cannot look on coolly while they
destroy it a single blow. And that poor Mannheim, all
that cost the late Prince elector my father so much
toil and trouble. Yes, when I think of all that
has been ruined there. It fills me with such horror
that every night, as soon as I begin to fall asleep,

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I seem to be at Heidelberger Monheim, beholding the ravages
that have been committed. Then I start up wide awake,
and it takes me more than two hours to go
to sleep again. I fancy how it all was in
my time, and to what condition it has been reduced
to day. I consider also in what condition I am myself,

(06:00):
and I cannot avoid weeping bitter tears. The Princess found
few with whom she sympathized. In this large and brilliant court.
She admired neither the men, the women, nor the things
that figured there. Everything displeased and annoyed her. The figure
of the King, whom she somewhat ironically called the Great Man,

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was the only one that seemed to her majestic, And
even on that sun she discovered many spots. Her family
afforded her no satisfaction. She had the sorriest opinion of
her husband, who was incessantly occupied with futilities, masquerades, and
cynical intrigues. One of her letters, written in sixteen ninety six,

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contains this curious passage Monsieurs says openly, and he had
not concealed it from either his daughter or me, that
as he is beginning to grow old, he has no
time to lose. That he will do everything and spare
nothing to amuse himself up to the last. That those
who survive him will know how to spend their time

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after their own fashion. But that he loves himself better
than me or his children, and that in consequence he intends,
so long as he lives, to attend to no one
but himself, and he acts as he talks. Madame was
not more happy in her son, the future Regent, than

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in her husband. The judgment she passed on this son,
who wilfully spoiled the fine qualities he had been endowed
with by nature, justifies that of Louis the fourteenth. On
this boaster of vices, fant feren De vises, 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. And that what annoys me most of all.
If the pleasure were in his nature, I should not
have much to say against it, but that he should
do violence to himself in order to take to vice
and talk twaddle, while at the same time he hides

(08:16):
everything that is good in him. This is what I
cannot endure without pain. The Princess Palatine had a horror
of illegitimate births, and her pride was outraged by the
rank occupied at court by the daughters of Louis the
fourteenth and Madame de Montespont, whom she detested, to use

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her own expression as being the bastards of a double adultery,
the children of the worst and most abandoned woman that
the earth can bear. Hence, when her son consented to
marry one of these bastards, she was so enraged as
to give him in the gallery of their sille, that

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vigorous and resounding slap in the face which re echoes
so plainly in Saint Simon's memoirs. She wrote in seventeen hundred,
my son has caused me much grief in addition to
his marriage. What I find worst in his conduct is
that I am the only one who cannot have his friendship,

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For with that exception, he is good to everybody, and
yet I have only lost his friendship by always advising
him in his own interest. At present I have taken
my stand. I say nothing more to him, and speak
to him as I would to the first comer of
indifferent things. But it is a very painful thing not

(09:41):
to be able to open one's heart to those one loves. Inwardly,
tormented and exasperated by her husband's favorites, saddened as a wife,
a mother, and a German, Madame cared little for the
splendors of Versailles and Saint clud where her existence was

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a blending of luxury and poverty. Certainly, said she, I
would attach great value to grandeur if one could have
all that should accompany it, plenty of gold, for instance,
in order to be magnificent, and the power to assist
the good and punish the wicked. But to have only

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the name of grandeur without the money, to be reduced
to the strictest necessaries, to live under perpetual constraint, without
its being possible to have any society. This seems to me,
in truth, perfectly insipid, and I care nothing whatever about it.
I should prize more a condition in which one could

(10:44):
amuse one's self with good friends, without the troubles of grandeur,
and do with one's property whatever one pleased. How did
the Princess Palatine continue to divert herself from so many
worries and cares by hunting and writing? The chase and
still more the epistolary style. These were her two passions,

(11:08):
her two manias. From sixteen seventy one, the year of
her marriage, to seventeen twenty two, the year of her death,
she never stopped writing letters to members of her German family.
On Mondays, she wrote to Savoy, on Wednesdays, to Modona
Thursdays and Sundays to Hanover. But this rage for scribbling

(11:32):
was fatal to her. Notwithstanding, her correspondence, opened at the
post office, was sent to Madame de Mantinon, who showed
the imprudent Princess a letter full of the most outrageous
insults one can fancy, says Saint Simon, whether at this
aspect and this reading Madame did not think of dying

(11:55):
on the spot she began to cry, and Madame de
mantinean to represent modestly to her the enormity of every
part of this letter, and in a foreign country too.
The best excuse for Madame was to own up what
she could not deny pardons, repentances, prayers, promises. Madame de

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Mantinon coldly enjoyed her triumph for some time, letting the
princess choke over her words, weep and try to take
her hands. It was a terrible humiliation for so arrogant
and proud a German. Nothing more is needed to explain
the hatred of the Princess Palatine for her, to whom

(12:41):
in her rage she applied the old German proverb, where
the devil cannot go himself, he sends an old woman.
Madame quieted down when she became a widow in seventeen
o one. No convent, said she the day after Monsieur died.
Let no one talk to me about a convent. Happy

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to remain at court in spite of the ill things
she had said about it, she softened toward Madame de
Mantonan sufficiently to write in seventeen twelve, although the old
woman is our most cruel enemy. Still I wish her
a long life, for everything would go ten times worse
than it does if the King were to die now,

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he has loved this woman so much that he certainly
would not survive her. Therefore, I hope she may live
for many years. Madame ended her days like a good Christian,
and Massillon, in a beautiful funeral oration rendered due homage
to the courage she had displayed in her last sufferings.

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To those who surrounded her death bed, she had said,
with a calmness worthy of Louis the fourteenth, we shall
meet again in heaven to sum up. Madame, the Duchess
of Orleon, is a very strange type, but she demands attention,
whether or no, in her uprightness and good sense. Justice

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and humanity coexist with great caprices in her letters. Amidst
a mass of insignificant details, more or less inexact anecdotes, commonplaces,
and worldly gossip, there are thoughts worthy of a moralist,
and judgments that bear the stamp of wisdom. It is

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true she preached morality in cynical language, but if she
speaks of debauchery, it is only to stigmatize it and
depict its shamefulness. She has at least the merit of
seeing vice as it is, of looking it in the face,
of detesting it with a warlike, aggressive, irreconcilable hatred, of

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stigmatizing it in Rabelasian accents, whose triviality renders them more
striking than fine hum For that matter, are not crudities
of language and audacities of expression less dangerous than certain
refinements of half mystical, half sensual poesy, which, by confounding

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the alcove with the oratory, envelop voluptuousness in a cloud
of incense. End of Section fifteen.