Ch. 14: The Old Age of Madame de Montespan

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Section nineteen of Women of Versailles The Court of Louis
the fourteenth by Artur Leon Ambert de Saint Amo, translated
by Elizabeth Gilbert Martin. This LibriVox recording is in the
public domain. Read by Pamela and Nagami, Chapter fourteen, the
Old Age of Madame de Montispod. It is through their

(00:24):
pride that those are punished to have sinned. By pride
and haughty natures are nearly always those whom Providence condemns
to cruel humiliations. Of all the favorites of Louis the
fourteenth Madame de Montispod had been the most arrogant and despotic.
She was also the most humiliated. Unable to accustom herself

(00:48):
to her deposition, she remained more than ten years at court,
although she had become burdensome to the king and to herself.
People said she was like one of those unhanf happy
souls who come back to expiate their faults in the
places where they committed them. There was a remnant of
irony in wrath and the semi conversion of this haughty

(01:10):
Montemar going to see Madame de Mantineau one day, she
met there the couree and the gray sisters of Versailles,
who had come to attend a charitable meeting. Do you know, Madame,
she said, accosting her, that your antechamber is wonderfully adorned
for your prayers. The king continued to see the mother

(01:32):
of the legitimated children every day after Mass, he went
to spend a few minutes with her, but as it were,
from duty not pleasure. In sixteen eighty six, at Marlee,
she said to him, in a moment of exasperation, I
have a favor to ask you leave to me the

(01:52):
care of entertaining the people of the second carriage and
of diverting the anti chamber. Between the the fourteenth and
his former mistress, there was neither unreserve, confidence, love, nor friendship.
What remained after their liaison was not even a souvenir,
not even respect, but only remorse, devoured by ambition and

(02:17):
by scruples, dragged hither and thither by her passions, as
if by so many wild horses. Madame de Montespont was
for many long years the prey of that daily, hourly struggle,
which is one of the most painful psychological agonies that
can be imagined. Mosieur the racine of the Christian pulpit.

(02:41):
The moralist preacher, so skillful in sounding the depths of
the female heart, has described better than anyone else, those
fitful repentances which entail all the bitterness of penitence, without
giving any of its consolations. These hearts which the world
has always occupied, and which wish to consecrate to God,

(03:03):
the remains of a holy, mundane existence. What a buckler
of brass? Do they not oppose to grace? They may
seek for the Kingdom of God and the hidden treasure
of the Gospel, but it is like wretched slaves condemned
to seek for gold through hard rocks and toilsome mines.
It seems as if in virtue they are playing another's part.

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Although they are seeking salvation and good faith. There appears
in them a nameless constraint and strangeness which makes one
think they are merely pretending. Madame de Montespon wanted to
leave the court, but she had not the courage. She
could not say to herself, like Saint Augustine in his confessions,

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these trifles of trifles, these vanities of vanities, draw me
by my garment of flesh and whisper in my ear,
and are you sending us away? What? After this moment
shall we be no longer with you forever? This interior
struggle was but a duel between myself and me. The

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progress that goes on between the first symptoms of repentance
and the most complete and absolute penitence is an interesting
one to study. The former favorite ended by comprehending the
truth of Massillon's words. What comparison is there between the
frightful remorse of conscience, that hidden worm which gnaws us incessantly,

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that sadness of crime which undermines and brings us down,
that weight of iniquity which overwhelms us, that interior sword
which pierces us, and the lonely sorrow of penitence which
worketh salvation, My God? Can one complain of thee when
one has known the world and the thorns of the cross?

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Are they not flowers when compared to those that besie
at the paths of iniquity? There is an undercurrent of
morality in public opinion which makes the crowd contemplate with
a sort of pleasure the decay and ruin of certain fortunes.
Madame de Montespon no longer met friendly glances in the court,

(05:17):
which had lately been filled with her flatterers. Thus it
is that weis nearly always finds its chastisement here below.
Short as it is, life is long enough for the
vengeance of God to be accomplished, even on the earth.
After long clinging to the wrecks of her fortune and

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her beauty, like a shipwrecked sailor to the fragments of
his vessel, she who had formerly been called the Mistress
thundering and triumphant, at last resigned herself to retirement. On
March fifteenth, sixteen ninety one, she caused Bassuet to inform
the King that she had chosen her course of action

(05:59):
and would this time abandon Versailles forever. Thus the prelate
who had essayed sixteen years before to wrest her from
the clasp of guilty passions, was the same to whom
she now had recourse to break the last link of
the chain. And yet she still had hesitations and regrets.

(06:20):
A month after this pious resolution, Donjo wrote, Madame de
Montespaint has been at Clanille for several days and has
gone back to Paris. She says she has not absolutely
given up the court that she will see the king sometimes,
and that in fact they have been somewhat hasty and

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unfurnishing her apartment. But the favorite had been taken at
her word. Her quarters in the Chateau of Versailles were
thenceforth occupied by the Duc de men. She was never
again to see the theater of her sorry triumphs for
the King. Her departure was deliverance. Madame de Montespin lived

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by turns at the abbey of Fontevreaux, where her sister
was abbess, at the waters of Bourbon, where she went
every summer, at the Chateau of Woaron, which she had purchased,
and at the Convent of Saint Joseph, situated in Paris,
on the site now occupied by the Ministry of War.

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In this convent she received the most notable personages of
the court. The only arm chair in her salon was
her own. All France went there, says Saint Simon. She
spoke to each one like a queen, and as to visits,
she paid none, not even to Monsieur nor Madame, nor

(07:44):
the Grand Mademoiselle, nor to the Hotel Conde. There was
a superbly furnished chamber at the chateau of Woaron, and
though the king never went there, it was called the
King's chamber. From time to time the fallen favorite dream
still of that scepter of the left hand, which she
had once wielded with such an audacity of pride. She

(08:08):
was by turns ashamed and proud of being the mother
of legitimated children. But by slow degrees serious thoughts displaced
those of vanity and spite. The world was vanquished by heaven.
Scandal gave way to edification. The penitent arrived not only

(08:28):
at remorse, but at macerations, fasts and haircloths. This woman,
once so fastidious, so elegant, limited herself to the coarsest
under linen, and wore a belt and garter studded with
iron points. She came at last to give all she

(08:48):
had to the poor. For several hours a day she
busied herself in making coarse clothing for them. Close to
her chateau of Wochrol, she found it a hospital of
which she was rather the servant than the superior. She
nursed the sick herself and dressed their sores. As Monsieur
Pierre Clement has said so well in the fine study

(09:11):
he has devoted to her. The scandal had been great,
the defiance of morality, law, and the prescriptions of religion
insolent and prolonged. But when they proceed from so haughty
a nature, repentance and humility have redoubled value. By her
confessor's order, she resigned herself to the act which cost

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her most. She wrote a most humbly worded letter to
her husband, asking his pardon, and offering either to return
to him if he would deign to receive her, or
to go to any residence which he might choose to
assign for her. Monsieur de Montespont did not even answer.

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According to Sansimon, the former favorite was so tormented by
the terrors of death in her last years the she
hired several women whose only occupation was to watch with her.
At night. She slept with her curtains open, plenty of
candles in her chamber, and her watchers around her, whom
every time she woke she wanted to find chatting, playing cards,

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or eating, so as to be sure they were not drowsy.
I have difficulty in believing such an assertion to be exact.
Madame de Montespon was too proud for such pusillanimity. Fear
did not enter her soul. It is certain that she
died with as much dignity as courage, even by Saint

(10:37):
Simon's own avowal. In May seventeen o seven, when she
started for the baths of Bourbon, she was not ill,
and yet she had a presentiment that her end was approaching.
Under its influence, she had paid all the pensions she
was in the habit of giving for two years in advance,
and doubled her customary alms. Hardly had she arrived at

(11:01):
Bourbon when she took to her bed, never again to
leave it. Face to face with death, she neither defied
nor feared it. Father, she said to the Capuchin who
was assisting her at the last moments, exhort me, as
an ignorant person, as simply as you can. After summoning

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all her domestics around her, she asked pardon for the
scandal she had given, and thanked God for permitting her
to die in a place where she was distant from
the children of her sin. When her soul had departed,
her body, once so beautiful, so flattered, became the apprenticeship
of the surgeon of a steward from I don't know where,

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who happened to be at Bourbon, and who wanted to
open it without knowing how to begin. There was a
dispute between the priests and cannons when the coffin was
taken to the church, where it was to remain until
it could be sent to Poitier and placed in a
family tomb. The death of a woman who, for more
than thirty years, from sixteen sixty to sixteen ninety one,

(12:11):
had played so great a part at court caused no
impression there. Louis the fourteenth had long considered his former
mistress as dead to him. Donjoux contented himself with writing
in his journal Saturday May twenty eighth, seventeen o seven,
at Marly, before the king went out hunting, it was

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learned that Madame de Montespon died yesterday at Bourbon at
three o'clock in the morning. The king, after chasing a stag,
promenaded in the gardens until night. The Duke du Mens,
the Count de Toulouse, and the Duchesses of Bourbon and
Charts were formally prohibited to wear mourning for their mother, Daudont,

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her only legitimate child, put on black garments, but he
was too good a courdier to be sad when the
king was not so. He received his sovereign at Petibouick
a few days afterward, and in one single night had
an alley of chestnut trees, which was not to the
master's taste removed. As to Madame de Montespond, no one

(13:20):
mentioned her name again. Such is the world, It is
not worth the trouble of loving it. And of section
nineteen