MADAME DE MAINTENON

Timaru Herald, Volume CXXV, Issue 18617, 12 July 1930, Page 15

MADAME DE MAINTENON

VICTIM OF CALUMNY. Born in a prison and raised to a throne or next door to it—that, in a nutshell, was the career of the extraordinary woman contemptuously referred to by Saint-Simon as “the Widow Scarron,” and credited by him with every kind of vice and meanness. Miss Maud Cruttwell, her present biographer, by much patient research is enabled to refute these slanders and to assert with confidence that no personage of her importance in history has been so maligned, so misunderstood, so misrepresented. “Stigmatised as cruel, capricious, vindicative, fatal to France,

Madame de Maintenon was in reality a paragon of honesty, loyalty, and magnanimity; very simple, very

straightforward, supremely charitable; a saint whose sole ambitions were to convert her King and alleviate the misery caused by his wars.” No exotic enchantress, possessing nothing outsanding in the way of beauty, socially insignificant and reared in poverty, Louise d’Aubigny, by the force of her personality and her conversational powers, humbled and overshadowed the proud monarch who took as his emblem the mid-day sun. Much of the book is devoted to an account of Madame de Maintenon’s great educational project, St. Cyr. “In a reign otherwise dedicated to unbridled lust and extravagance, she was responsible for the noblest work of reform of her time.”

The book is amply illustrated in photogravure, and forms a well-docu-mented and convincing refutation of the slander with which malicious court gossip attacked a character too pure to be popular in the vitiated atmosphere of txie court of Louis XIV.

“Madame de Maintenon,” by Maud Cruttwell (Dent).