Mme. de Maintenon was born in prison.  Her maiden name was Francoise d’Aubigne.  She was the granddaughter of Agrippa d’Aubigne, the historian.  Her father had planned to settle in the Carolinas, and his correspondence with the English government, to that effect, was treated as treason; he was thrown into prison, where his wife voluntarily shared his fate and where the future Mme. de Maintenon was born.  After the death of her father, she was confided to her aunt, Mme. de Villette, a Calvinist, who trained her in the principles of Protestantism.  Because of the refusal of her daughter to attend mass, her mother put her in charge of the Countess of Neuillant who, with great difficulty, converted Francoise back to Catholicism.

At the home of the Countess of Neuillant, she often met Scarron, the comic poet—­a paralytic and cripple—­who offered her money with which to pay for admission to a convent, a proposition which she refused; subsequently, however, the countess sent her to the Ursulines to be educated.  When, after two years, she lost her mother and was thus left without home, fortune, or future prospects, she consented, at the age of seventeen, to marry the poet.  Thus, born in a prison, without even a dowry, harshly reared by a mother who was under few obligations to life, more harshly treated in the convent, introduced as a poor relation into the society of her aunt and to the friends of her godmother, the Countess of Neuillant, she early learned to distrust life and suspect man, and to restrain her ambitions.

Exceedingly beautiful, graceful, and witty, she soon won her way to the brilliant and fashionable society of the crippled wit, buffoon, and poet, who was coarse, profane, ungodly, and physically an unsightly wreck.  In this society, which the burlesque poet amused by his inexhaustible wit and fancy, and his frank, Gallic gayety, she showed an infinite amount of tact and soon made his salon the most prominent social centre of Paris.  There, Scarron, never tolerated a stupid person, no matter of what blood or rank.

When asked what settlement he proposed to make upon his wife, he replied:  “Immortality.”  At another time, he remarked:  “I shall not make her commit any follies, but I shall teach her a great many.”  On his deathbed he said:  “My only regret is that I cannot leave anything to my wife with whom I have every imaginable reason to be content.”  In this free-and-easy salon, a young noble said, soon after the marriage of Scarron:  “If it were a question of taking liberties with the queen or Mme. Scarron, I would not deliberate; I would sooner take them with the queen.”