Now, Madame de Maintenon, whatever her defects, her pharisaism, her cunning, her ambition, and her narrow religious intolerance, was still, it would seem, always respected, not only by the King himself,—­a great discerner of character,—­but by the court which she controlled, and even by that gay circle of wits who met around the supper-tables of her first husband.  The breath of scandal never tarnished her reputation; she was admired by priests as well as by nobles.  From this fact, which is well attested, we infer that she acted with transcendent discretion as the governess of the Duke of Maine, even when brought into the most intimate relations with the King; and that when reigning at the court after the death of the Queen, she must have been supposed to have a right to all the attentions which she received from Louis XIV.  And what is very remarkable about this woman is, that she should so easily have supplanted Madame de Montespan in the full blaze of her dazzling beauty, when the King was in the maturity of his power and in all the pride of external circumstance,—­she, born a Protestant, converted to Catholicism in her youth under protest, poor, dependent, a governess, the widow of a vulgar buffoon, and with antecedents which must have stung to the quick so proud a man as was Louis XIV.  With his severe taste, his experience, his discernment, with all the cynical and hostile influences of a proud and worldly court, and after a long and searching intimacy, it is hard to believe that he could have loved and honored her to his death if she had not been worthy of his esteem.  And when we remember that for nearly forty years she escaped the scandals which made those times unique in infamy, we are forced to concede that on the whole she must have been a good woman.  To retain such unbounded power for over thirty years is a very remarkable thing to do.

Madame de Maintenon, however, though wise and virtuous, made many grave mistakes, as she had many defects of character.  Great as she was, she has to answer for political crimes into which, from her narrow religious prejudices, she led the King.

The most noticeable feature in the influence which Madame de Maintenon exercised on the King was in inciting a spirit of religious intolerance.  And this appeared even long before Madame de Montespan had lost her ascendency.  For ten years before the revocation of the Edict of Nantes there had been continual persecution of the Protestants in France, on the ground that they were heretics, though not rebels.  And the same persecuting spirit was displayed in reference to the Jansenists, who were Catholics, and whose only sin was intellectual boldness.  Anybody who thought differently from the monarch incurred the royal displeasure.  Intellectual freedom and honesty were the real reasons of the disgrace of Racine and Fenelon.  For the King was a bigot in religion as well as a despot on a throne.  He fancied that he was very pious.  He was regular in all his religious duties.  He was an earnest and conscientious adherent to all the doctrines of the Catholic Church.  In his judgment, a departure from those doctrines should be severely punished.  He was as sincere as Torquemada, or Alva, or Saint Dominic.  His wife encouraged this bigotry, and even stimulated his resentments toward those who differed from him.