Arvède Barine - La Grande Mademoiselle

La Grande Mademoiselle was one of the most original persons of her epoch, though it cannot be said that she was ever of the first order. Hers was but a small genius; there was nothing extraordinary in her character; and she had too little influence over events to have made it worth while to devote a whole volume to her history – much less to prepare for her a second chronicle – had she not been an adventurous and picturesque princess, a proud, erect figure standing in the front rank of the important personages whom Emerson called "representative."

Mademoiselle's agitated existence was a marvellous commentary on the profound transformation accomplished in the mind of France toward the close of the seventeenth century, – a transformation whose natural reaction changed the being of France.

I have tried to depict this change, whose traces are often hidden by the rapid progress of historical events, because it was neither the most salient feature of the closing century nor the result of a revolution.

Essential, of the spirit, it passed in the depths of the eager souls of the people of those tormented days. Such changes are analogous to the changes in the light of the earthly seasons. From day to day, marking dates which vary with the advancing years, the intense light of summer gives place to the wan light of autumn. So the landscape is perpetually renewed by the recurring influences of natural revolution; in like manner, the moral atmosphere of France was changed and recharged with the principles of life in the new birth; and when the long civil labour of the Fronde was ended, the nation's mind had received a new and opposite impulsion, the casual daily event wore a new aspect, the sons viewed things in a light unknown to their fathers, and even to the fathers the appearance of things had changed. Their thoughts, their feelings, their whole moral being had changed.

It is the gradual progress of this transformation that I have attempted to show the reader. I know that my enterprise is ambitious; it would have been beyond my strength had I had nothing to refer to but the Archives and the various collections of personal memoirs. But two great poets have been my guides, Corneille and Racine, both faithful interpreters of the thoughts and the feelings of their contemporaries; and they have made clear the contrast between the two distinct social epochs – between the old and the new bodies, so different, yet so closely connected.

When the Christian pessimism of Racine had – in the words of Jules Lemaître – succeeded the stoical optimism of Corneille, all the conditions evolving their diverse lines of thought had changed.

The nature of La Grande Mademoiselle was exemplified in the moral revolution which gave us Phédre thirty-four years (the space of a generation) after the apparition of Pauline .

In the first part of her life, – the part depicted in this volume, – Mademoiselle was as true a type of the heroines of Corneille as any of her contemporaries. Not one of the great ladies of her world had a more ungovernable thirst for grandeur; not one of them cherished more superb scorn for the baser passions, among which Mademoiselle classed the tender sentiment of love. But, like all the others, she was forced to renounce her ideals; and not in her callow youth, when such a thing would have been natural, but when she was growing old, was she carried away by the torrent of the new thought, whose echoes we have caught through Racine.

The limited but intimately detailed and somewhat sentimental history of Mademoiselle is the history of France when Louis XIII. was old, and when young Louis – Louis XIV. – was a minor, living the happiest years of all his life.

If I seem presumptuous, let my intention be my excuse for so long soliciting the attention of my reader in favour of La Grande Mademoiselle.

I. Gaston d'Orléans – His Marriage – His Character – II. Birth of Mademoiselle – III. The Tuileries in 1627 – The Retinue of a Princess – IV. Contemporary Opinions of Education – The Education of Boys – V. The Education of Girls – VI. Mademoiselle's Childhood – Divisions of the Royal Family.

In the Château of Versailles there is a full-length portrait of La Grande Mademoiselle, – so called because of her tall stature, – daughter of Gaston d'Orléans, and niece of Louis XIII. When the portrait was painted, the Princess's hair was turning grey. She was forty-five years old. Her imperious attitude and warlike mien befit the manners of the time of her youth, as they befit her Amazonian exploits in the days of the Fronde.

Her lofty bearing well accords with the adventures of the illustrious girl whom the customs and the life of her day, the plays of Corneille, and the novels of La Calprenède and of Scudéry imbued with sentiments much too pompous. The painter of the portrait had seen Mademoiselle as we have seen her in her own memoirs and in the memoirs of her companions.

Nature had fitted her to play the part of the goddess in exile; and it had been her good fortune to find suitable employment for faculties which would have been obstacles in an ordinary life. To become the Minerva of Versailles, Mademoiselle had to do nothing but yield to circumstances and to float onward, borne by the current of events.

In the portrait, under the tinselled trappings the deep eyes look out gravely, earnestly; the thoughtful face is naively proud of its borrowed divinity; and just as she was pictured – serious, exalted in her assured dignity, convinced of her own high calling – she lived her life to its end, too proud to know that hers was the fashion of a bygone age, too sure of her own position to note the smiles provoked by her appearance. She ignored the fact that she had denied her pretensions by her own act (her romance with Lauzun, – an episode by far too bourgeois for the character of an Olympian goddess). She had given the lie to her assumption of divinity, but throughout the period of her romance she bore aloft her standard, and when it was all over she came forth unchanged, still vested with her classic dignity. The old Princess, who excited the ridicule of the younger generation, was, to the few surviving companions of her early years, the living evocation of the past. To them she bore the ineffaceable impression of the thought, the feeling, the inspiration, the soul of France, as they had known it under Richelieu and Mazarin.

The influences that made the tall daughter of Gaston d'Orléans a romantic sentimentalist long before sentimental romanticism held any place in France, ruled the destinies of French society at large; and because of this fact, because the same influences that directed the illustrious daughter of France shaped the course of the whole French nation, the solitary figure – though it was never of a high moral order – is worthy of attention. La Grande Mademoiselle is the radiant point whose light illumines the shadows of the past in which she lived.

Anne-Marie-Louise d'Orléans, Duchess of Montpensier, was the daughter of Gaston of France, younger brother of King Louis XIII., and of a distant cousin of the royal family, Marie of Bourbon, Duchess of Montpensier. It would be impossible for a child to be less like her parents than was La Grande Mademoiselle. Her mother was a beautiful blond personage with the mild face of a sheep, and with a character well fitted to her face. She was very sweet and very tractable. Mademoiselle's father resembled the decadents of our own day. He was a man of sickly nerves, vacillating, weak of purpose, with a will like wax, who formed day-dreams in which he figured as a gallant and warlike knight, always on the alert, always the omnipotent hero of singularly heroic exploits. He deluded himself with the idea that he was a real prince, a typical Crusader of the ancient days. In his chaotic fancy he raised altar against altar, burning incense before his purely personal and peculiar gods, taking principalities by assault, bringing the kings and all the powers of the earth into subjection, bearing down upon them with his might, and shifting them like the puppets of a chess-board. His efforts to attain the heights pictured by his imagination resulted in awkward gambols through which he lost his balance and fell, crushed by the weight of his own folly. Thus his life was a series of ludicrous but tragic burlesques.