Madame de Maintenon Uncrowned Queen of France

"The biographer in search of Mme de Maintenon's true personality inevitably turns first of all to her own correspondence. And there the enigma of this extraordinary woman immediately reveals itself. For although she wrote thousands of letters between the ages of fifteen and eighty-four, she burned almost the whole of her correspondence with Louis XIV. In consequence no direct evidence remains regarding her relationship with him either before or after their marriage. The fact that this did take place however is generally accepted. Few if any women have played so important a part behind the scenes in their country's history. The only time Mme de Maintenon emerged from this political seclusion was during the War of the Spanish Succession, when Louis XIV was using correspondence with the Princesse des Ursin as an ancillary channel of communication with the Spanish Court, independently of his official representatives there. Until well into the nineteenth century, Mme de Maintenon was regarded as an unsympathetic figure. The libels propagated by Saint-Simon and the Duchesse d'Orléans in her lifetime were further enhanced by the forgeries of her correspondence by La Beaumelle, which were only exposed in 1865 by the scholarly researches of Lavallée. My aim has been neither to strengthen the case of Françoise de Maintenon's hagiographers nor of her slanderers, but to present my readers with the facts as far as they are ascertainable, and leave them to judge for themselves. I hope that they will agree with me that she was neither a saint nor a devil, but one of the most remarkable women in European history." -- preface.