Saint-Amand has observed truly that the women of Versailles were interesting not only from the moral point of view and as subjects of study, but on account of what he called the “symbolical importance of their relations to the history of France.”  Each seemed to be the living expression of the spirit of her day.  Madame de Montespan was just such a superb, luxurious and magnificent beauty as Versailles needed to display to all the ambassadors that came to bask in the glitter of the Sun King’s Court.  She was the dazzling mistress that ruled imperiously over the gay and brilliant life of the palace, the very incarnation of haughty and triumphant France at the culminating point of the reign of Louis XIV.

Then came Madame de Maintenon who, with her discreet and temperate nature, restored order, and was, for years, the living symbol of a changed condition in the Court in which piety and religious observance displaced licentious and voluptuous pleasure.  And, along with this “wisdom of a repentant age,” as Saint-Amand observes, “this reaction of austerity against pleasure, there was still the contrast of youth.”  It was the Duchess of Burgundy who was the living embodiment of this protest of joy against sadness, of springtime against cold winter, of licentiousness against the exacting restrictions of etiquette.  Affairs in the Court had reached a turning point, and it was the logical mind of Madame de Maintenon that saw it.  When Madame de Montespan was in the ascendancy, the Court had reached a condition of voluptuous indulgence that could not continue long.  The Princess Palatine, wife of the brother of Louis XIV, wrote:  “I hear and see every day so many villainous things that it disgusts me with life.  You have good reason to say that the good Queen is now happier than we are, and if any one would do me, as to her and her mother, the service of sending me in twenty-four hours from this world to the other, I would certainly bear him no ill will.”

However we may question the soul sincerity of Madame de Maintenon, to her at least we must give credit for checking the corrupt tendencies of the Court and, with correcting finger, pointing the way toward better things.  After Louis XIV, as Saint-Amand points out, the conditions of the Court of France were reflected even more vividly in the characters of the women of Versailles.  “With compression and reserve,” he observes, “there followed scandal.  During the regency and the reign of Louis XV the morals of the Court fast deteriorated.  A new epoch opened—­troublous, lewd, dissolute.  And was not the Duchess of Berry eccentric, capricious, passionate, the very image of the time?  The favorites of Louis XV indicate to us in their own sad history the conditions of debasing humiliation and moral decadence of monarchical power.  At first Louis XV chose his favorites from among ladies of quality—­after that, from the middle classes, and, finally, from the common women of the people.”  He did not stop at the low-born shop girl or the frequenter of evil resorts.