“They say you take too little part in affairs.  Your mind is more capable than you think.  You are, perhaps, a little too distrustful of yourself, or, rather, you are too much afraid to enter into discussions contrary to the inclination you have for a tranquil and meditative life.”

Is this picture, left by Emile Chasles and accepted by M. Saint-Amand, truthful?  “This intelligent woman, far from being too much heeded, was not enough so.  There was in her a veritable love for the public welfare, a true sorrow in the midst of our misfortunes.  To-day, it is necessary to retrench much from the grandeur of her worldly power and add a great deal to that of her soul.”  M. Saint-Amand believes her sincere when she wrote to Mme. des Ursins: 

“In whatever way matters turn, I conjure you, madame, to regard me as a person incapable of directing affairs, who heard them talked too late to be skilful in them, and who hates them more than she ignores them....  My interference in them is not desired and I do not desire to interfere.  They are not concealed from me, but I know nothing consecutively and am often badly informed.”

The opinions of her contemporaries are not always flattering, but such are possibly due to envy and jealousy or to some purely personal prejudice.  Thus, when the Duchess of Orleans, the Princesse Palatine, calls her “that nasty old thing, that wicked devil, that shrivelled-up, filthy old Maintenon, that concubine of the king,” and casts upon her other gross aspersions that are unfit to be repeated, one must remember that the calumniator was a German, the daughter of the Elector Palatine Charles-Louis, a woman honest in her morals, but shameless in her speech, who loved the beauties of nature more than those of the palaces; more shocked at hypocrites than at religion or irreligion, she took Mme. de Maintenon to be a type of the impostors whom she detested.  It was her son who became regent, and it was her son who married one of the illegitimate daughters of Louis XIV.—­an alliance of which his mother had a horror.

The memoirs of Saint-Simon are interesting, but the odious picture he has drawn of Mme. de Maintenon is hardly in accord with later appreciations.  M. Saint-Amand sums up the two classes of critics thus: 

“The revolutionary school which likes to drag the memory of the great king through the mire, naturally detests the eminent woman who was that king’s companion, his friend and consoler.  Writers of this school would like to make of her a type not only odious and fatal, but ungraceful and unsympathetic, without radiance, charm or any sort of fascination.  She is too frequently called to mind under the aspect of a worn old woman, stiff and severe, with tearless eyes and a face without a smile.  We forget that in her youth she was one of the prettiest women of her time, that her beauty was wonderfully preserved, and that in her old age she retained that superiority of style and language, that distinction of manner and exquisite tact, that gentle firmness of character, that charm and elevation of mind, which, at every period of her life, gained her so much praise and so many friends.”