Madame de Maintenon exerted her vast influence in favor of morality and learning.  She rewarded genius and scholarship.  She was the patron of those distinguished men who rendered important services to France, whether statesmen, divines, generals, or scholars.  She sought to bring to the royal notice eminent merit in every department of life within the ranks of orthodoxy.  A poet, or painter, or orator, who gave remarkable promise, was sure of her kindness; and there were many such.  For the world is full at all times of remarkable young men and women, but there are very few remarkable men at the age of fifty.

And her influence on the court was equally good.  She discouraged levities, gossip, and dissipation.  If the palace was not so gay as during the reign of Madame de Montespan, it was more decorous and more intellectual.  It became fashionable to go to church, and to praise good sermons and read books of casuistry.  “Tartuffe grew pale before Escobar.”  Bossuet and Bourdaloue were equal oracles with Moliere and Racine.  Great preachers were all the fashion.  The court became very decorous, if it was hypocritical.  The King interested himself in theological discussions, and became as austere as formerly he was gay and merry.  He regretted his wars and his palace-building; for both were discouraged by Madame de Maintenon, who perceived that they impoverished the nation.  She undertook the mighty task of reforming the court itself, as well as the morals of the King; and she partially succeeded.  The proud Nebuchadnezzar whom she served was at last made to confess that there was a God to whom he was personally responsible; and he was encouraged to bear with dignity those sad reverses which humiliated his pride, and drank without complaint the dregs of that bitter cup which retributive justice held out in mercy before he died.  It was his wife who revealed the deceitfulness, the hypocrisy, the treachery, and the heartlessness of that generation of vipers which he had trusted and enriched.  She was more than the guardian of his interests; she was his faithful friend, who dissuaded him from follies.  So that outwardly Louis XIV. became a religious man, and could perhaps have preached a sermon on the vanity of a worldly life,—­that whatever is born in vanity must end in vanity.

It is greatly to the credit of Madame de Maintenon that she was interested in whatever tended to improve the morals of the people or to develop the intellect.  She was one of those strong-minded women who are impressible by grand sentiments.  She would have admired Madame de Stael or Madame Roland,—­not their opinions, but their characters.  Politics was perhaps the most interesting subject to her, as it has ever been to very cultivated women in France; and it was with the details of cabinets and military enterprises that she was most familiar.  It was this political knowledge which made her so wise a counsellor and so necessary a companion to the King.  But her reign