his refined courtesies of manner, and his sparkling but inoffensive wit,—­a born courtier as well as philosopher, the most interesting and accomplished man of his generation,—­still, neither Bossuet nor Madame de Maintenon nor the King could tolerate his teachings, so pregnant were they with innovations; and he was exiled to his bishopric.  Madame de Maintenon, who once delighted in Fenelon, learned to detest him as much as Bossuet did, when the logical tendency of his writings was seen.  She would rivet the chains of slavery on the human intellect as well as on the devotees of Rome or the courtiers of the King, while Fenelon would have emancipated the race itself in the fervor and sincerity of his boundless love.

This hostility to Fenelon was not caused entirely by the political improvements he would have introduced, but because his all-embracing toleration sought to protect the sentimental pantheism which Madame Guyon inculcated in her maxims of disinterested love and voluntary passivity of the soul towards God, in opposition to that rationalistic pantheism which Spinoza defended, and into which he had inexorably pushed with unexampled logic the deductions of Malebranche.  The men who finally overturned the fabric of despotism which Richelieu constructed were the philosophers.  The clear but narrow intellect of the King and his wife instinctively saw in them the natural enemies of the throne; and hence they were frowned upon, if not openly persecuted.

We are forced therefore to admit that the intolerance of Madame de Maintenon, repulsive as it was, arose in part, like the intolerance of Bossuet, from zeal to uphold the institutions and opinions on which the Church and the throne were equally based.  The Jesuits would call such a woman a nursing mother of the Church, a protector of the cause of orthodoxy, the watchful guardian of the royal interests and those of all established institutions.  Any ultra-conservatism, logically carried out, would land any person on the ground where she stood.

But while Madame de Maintenon was a foe to everything like heresy, or opposition to the Catholic Church, or true intellectual freedom, she was the friend of education.  She was the founder of the celebrated School of St. Cyr, where three hundred young ladies, daughters of impoverished nobles, were educated gratuitously.  She ever took the greatest interest in this school, and devoted to it all the time her numerous engagements would permit.  She visited it every day, and was really its president and director.  There was never a better school for aristocratic girls in a Catholic country.  She directed their studies and superintended their manners, and brought to bear on their culture her own vast experience.  If Bossuet was a born priest, she was a born teacher.  It was for the amusement of the girls that Racine was induced by her to write one of his best dramas,—­“Queen Esther,” a sort of religious tragedy in the severest taste, which was performed by the girls in the presence of the most distinguished people of the court.