his authority were equally involved
in the cause of propriety and regularity at his court; he imposed this
yoke as well as all the others; there appeared to be entire obedience;
only some princes or princesses escaped it sometimes, getting about them
a few free-thinkers or boon-companions; good, honest folks showed
ingenuous joy; the virtuous and far-sighted were secretly uneasy at the
falsehood, and deplored the pressure put on so many consciences and so
many lives. The king was sincere in his repentance for the past, many
persons in his court were as sincere as he; others, who were not,
affected, in order to please him, the externals of austerity; absolute
power oppressed all spirits, extorting from them that hypocritical
complaisance which is liable to engender; corruption was already brooding
beneath appearances of piety; the reign of Louis XV. was to see its
deplorable fruits displayed with a haste and a scandal which are to be
explained only by the oppression exercised in the last years of King
Louis XIV.

Madame de Maintenon was like the genius of this reaction towards
regularity, propriety, order; all the responsibility for it had been
thrown upon her; the good she did has disappeared beneath the evil she
allowed or encouraged; the regard lavished upon her by the king has
caused illusions as to the discreet care she was continually taking to
please him. She was faithful to her friends, so long as they were in
favor with the king; if they had the misfortune to displease him, she,
at the very least, gave up seeing them; without courage or hardihood to
withstand the caprices and wishes of Louis XIV., she had gained and
preserved her empire by dint of dexterity and far-sighted suppleness
beneath the externals of dignity.

She never forgot her origin. "I am not a grandee," she would say;
"I am a mushroom." Her life, entirely devoted to the king, had become a
veritable slavery; she said as much to Mdlle. d'Aumale at St. Cyr. "I
have to take for my prayers and for mass the time when everybody else is
still sleeping. For, when once they begin coming into my room, at half
past seven, I haven't another moment to myself. They come filing in, and
nobody goes out without being relieved by somebody higher. At last comes
the king; then, of course, they all have to go out; he remains with me up
to mass. I am, still in my night-cap. The king comes back after mass;
then the Duchess of Burgundy with her ladies. They re