ame de Maintenon paid no inconsiderable a
penalty. She was insulted by the royal family to the day of her death.
The Dauphin would not visit her, even when the King led him to the door
of her apartments. The courtiers mocked her behind her back. Her rivals
thrust upon her their envenomed libels. Even Racine once so far forgot
himself as to allude in her presence to the miserable farces of the poet
Scarron,--an unpremeditated and careless insult which she never forgot
or forgave. Moreover, in all her grandeur she was doomed to the most
exhaustive formalities and duties; for the King exacted her constant
services, which wearied and disgusted her. She was born for freedom, but
was really a slave, although she wore gilded fetters. She was not what
one would call an unhappy or disappointed woman, since she attained the
end to which she had aspired. But she could not escape humiliations. She
was in a false position. Her reputation was aspersed. She was only a
wife whose marriage was concealed; she was not a queen. All she gained,
she extorted. In rising to the exalted height of ruling the court of
France she yet abdicated her throne as an untrammelled queen of society,
and became the slave of a pompous, ceremonious, self-conscious,
egotistical, selfish, peevish, self-indulgent, tyrannical, exacting,
priest-ridden, worn-out, disenchanted old voluptuary. And when he died
she was treated as a usurper rather than a wife, and was obliged to
leave the palace, where she would have been insulted, and take up her
quarters in the convent she had founded. The King did not leave her by
his will a large fortune, so that she was obliged to curtail her
charities.

Madame de Maintenon lived to be eighty-four, and retained her
intellectual faculties to the last, retiring to the Abbey of St. Cyr on
the death of the King in 1715, and surviving him but four years. She was
beloved and honored by those who knew her intimately. She was the idol
of the girls of St. Cyr, who worshipped the ground on which she trod.
Yet she made no mark in history after the death of Louis XIV. All her
greatness was but the reflection of his glory. Her life, successful as
it was, is but a confirmation of the folly of seeking a position which
is not legitimate. No position is truly desirable which is a false one,
which can be retained only by art, and which subjects one to humiliation
and mortifications. I have great admiration for the many excellent
qualities of this e