But by then she had become known at court, mostly through the king’s - Louis XIV's - mistress the Marquise de Montespan, who persuaded the king to hire her as governness of the royal children, and then to create for her the title “second lady-in-waiting to the Dauphine"; and with that enough money to purchase the estate at Maintenon and rename herself Marquise accordingly. When her patroness, Montespan, was deeply implicated in a poisoning scandal, and dumped, and then the queen, Maria Teresa, left Louis XIV a widower... the Marquise and His Bereaved Majesty were secretly married on October 9 1683, despite his having described her after their first meeting as “unbearable”.
She was never officially recognised as queen by
name, but in practice she exerted huge influence upon him, both directly and
through the impact she had already had on his children. Madame de Sévigné wrote
much about her, reporting that Louis was charmed by her frank manner of
speaking to him when they discussed those normal themes of married couples:
politics, economics and religion. Really she is included in this blog because she did one thing of real significance in her life, which was to found the Maison Royale de Saint-Louis
at Saint-Cyr, the boarding school for girls that Napoleon Buonaparte's
sister Elisa would attend - one of its last students as it was shut down in the
revolution and then turned by Napoleon into a military academy. But it started a process of moving girls out of convents, where mathematics meant counting rosary beads, science was prohibited, and the only literature available was liturgy and gospel, and enabling real education. She died
peacefully in one of the grand rooms at the Maison Royale in her 84th year.
Amber pages
Cornelius Vanderbilt, philanthropist, born today in 1843; and see my derogatory comment about wealthy philanthropists on November 26!. Railroads and shipping in his case. Dagny Taggart versus John Galt!
Chaim Weizmann, modern Israel's first President, born today in 1874
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