After the king’s death she dismissed all her servants and disposed of her carriages as well, “unable to reconcile herself to feeding horses while so many young girls were in need,” as she said.  For almost four years she peacefully and happily lived in a very modest apartment.  She seldom went out and then only to the village to visit the sick and the poor.  On June 10, 1717, when she was eighty-one years old, Peter the Great went to Saint-Cyr for the purpose of seeing and talking to the greatest woman of France.  He found her confined to her bed; the chamber being but dimly lighted, he thrust aside the curtain in order to examine the features of the woman who had ruled the destinies of France for so many years.  The Czar talked to her for some time, and when he asked Madame de Maintenon from what she was suffering, she replied:  “From great old age.”  She died on August 15, 1719, and was buried in the choir of the church of Saint-Cyr, where a modest slab of marble indicated the spot where her body reposed until, in 1794, when the church was being transformed into hospital wards, “the workmen opened the vault, and took out the body and dragged it into the court with dreadful yells and threw it, stripped and mutilated, into a hole in the cemetery.”

The greatest work of Mme. de Maintenon was the founding of the Seminary of Saint-Cyr, which the king granted to her about the time of their marriage and of his illness; it was probably intended as the penance of a sick man who wished to make reparation for the wrongs inflicted upon some of the young girls of the nobility, and as a wedding gift to Mme. de Maintenon.  There, aided by nuns, she cared for and educated two hundred and fifty pupils, dowerless daughters of impoverished nobles.  It was “the veritable offspring of her who was never a daughter, a wife, nor a mother.”  There she was happy and content; there she recalled her own youth when she was poor and forsaken; there she found respite from the turmoils and agitations of Versailles; there she was supreme; there she governed absolutely and was truly loved.

For thirty years she was queen at Saint-Cyr, visiting it every other day and teaching the young girls for whom it was a protection against the world.  Since childhood, she had been so accustomed to serve herself, to wait upon others and to care for the smallest details of the management of the household, that she introduced this spirit into society and at Saint-Cyr, where she managed every detail, from the linen to the provisions; this showed a reasonable and well-balanced mind, but not any high order of intelligence.