Conversation as Child’s Play: The Performances of Madame de Maintenon’s Conversations at the Royale Maison de Saint-Louis

The Royale Maison de Saint-Louis, commonly known as the École de Saint-Cyr, was created near Versailles in 1686 to give selected daughters of France’s poor nobility an exemplary education. The school was cofounded by Louis XIV and his second wife Françoise d’Aubigné, Marquise de Maintenon, who also directed it until her death in 1719. Attached to the court of Louis XIV and at the same time removed from it, this school was the carefully guarded jewel of the French monarchy. The students, educators, and staff formed the gated Communauté de Saint-Louis, and Maintenon limited its exposure to the court and the outside world. The novelist Madeleine de Scudéry, who visited the school in 1688, described it as a “beautiful retreat” from the activity and intrigue of the court and a haven of Christian morality. ¹ Whether learning catechism, general history, drawing, or household management, its students were steeped in piety and moral rectitude.

Though Maintenon had an austere reputation, one practice at Saint-Cyr reveals that she made room in her exemplary curriculum for fun, and even for poking fun. She composed brief, salon-style conversations for her students to recite in order to learn moral values and correct social speech. As I will show in this essay, through this seemingly innocuous exercise, Maintenon’s sense of mischief and humor joined that of her students.

Students at Saint-Cyr recited Maintenon’s Conversations beginning in the late 1680s and continuing well into the eighteenth century. Teachers transcribed them and students composed their own in an imitative style. A handful of such manuscripts are preserved at the Bibliothèque nationale de France. ² The first edition of Maintenon’s scripts was published posthumously in 1757 under the title Les Loisirs de Mme de Maintenon (Mme de Maintenon’s leisure). Several editions designating the texts as Conversations appeared throughout the nineteenth century. ³ The first critical annotated edition, by Constant Venesoen, was published in 2011 under the title Les Loisirs de Madame de Maintenon: Étude et textes (Madame’s de Maintenon’s leisure: Study and texts). ⁴ Both of these titles imply that the Conversations were for Maintenon’s personal enjoyment when she was not directing the school or supporting her husband in his royal functions. But while Maintenon took pleasure in composing these texts and listening to her students recite them, this essay will show that their purpose exceeded pure leisure.

Critical studies of Maintenon’s Conversations have focused on their content. ⁵ In this essay, I examine their performance conditions, delivery, and reception at Saint-Cyr to demonstrate Maintenon’s penchant for playing with her own principles and practices. Through a fine balance of wit and delicate raillery, inspired by salon sociability, the Conversations created a unique complicity: between the student performers and their audience, between the students and Maintenon, and among the students.

Saint-Cyr was a charitable institution devoted to the upbringing of 250 daughters of modest provincial nobility, many of whom had fathers who were injured or killed in military service to the king. Les Dames (the teachers) underwent a novitiate and took religious vows. Les Demoiselles de Saint-Cyr (the students) were mostly Catholics who had recently converted from Protestantism. Strongly associated with the image of the king who occasionally visited, Saint-Cyr and its curriculum, instructors, and students were promoted as models of a pious and parfaite education (perfect education). Maintenon gave students the skills and principles their noble status required. The youngest children underwent catechism and studied reading, writing, grammar, counting, and biblical history, after which they learned music, general history, geography, and certain elements of classical mythology. The older children studied French language, religion and morality, drawing, and advanced music, and learned how to manage household budgets and maintain relations with servants. Extracurricular activities included needlework, lessons on morality, readings, and dance. In short, Saint-Cyr was a proto-finishing school that assumed responsibility for its protégées’ entire education. Given their financial situations, these students were not destined to frequent the court and participate in its lavish spending, but to maintain the commerce of culture at home.

In a desire to instil her students with truly noble qualities, Maintenon linked simplicity and elevation, two recurrent themes in her correspondence on pedagogy. She used two counter-examples to reinforce her position: the convent school and the parvenu. Until 1691, Maintenon sought to distinguish her institution from traditional convent schools for girls. In 1693, she wrote in a letter to the school’s first headmistress, Catherine du Pérou, that “nous voulions une piété solide éloignée de toutes les petitesses des couvents” (we wanted to instil a solid sense of piety far from all of the mediocrities of convent schools). She aimed to teach her students “de l’élévation dans notre piété” (an elevated form of piety). ⁶ These two quotations point to Maintenon’s ideal of noble dignity in the service of God, free of the vanities, petty politics, and other complications associated with institutions. She was preoccupied with the idea of elevation through education. The historian Carolyn C. Lougee suggests that Maintenon sought to reconcile “noble status” with “bourgeois values” at Saint-Cyr, in line with the ideas of François de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon, who became the school’s spiritual counsellor. ⁷ More accurately, perhaps, Maintenon sought to distinguish noble simplicity from the fussiness of bourgeois pretension. Only the parvenu scorns sweeping, she famously maintained. ⁸ A true noble had nothing to prove through ostentation.

A true noble also mastered the art of salon conversation. How could Maintenon teach the subtleties of salon culture behind the thick walls of Saint-Cyr? She rarely granted students permission to leave the premises, and closely monitored exchanges with visitors in the Parloir. Despite these precautions, the school attracted distinguished members of the court, as its institutional records, Rés. F 629–30, indicate for the years 1687 to 1688:

Saint cyr étoit nouveau, et dés là à la mode, tous les grands s’empréssoient d’y venir, Mme de Maintenon les amenoit souvent, et leur faisoit voir elle-même la maison dans le détail. Les Dames seules étoient alors invisibles, Mme de Maintenon vouloit qu’elles se tinsent cachées et qu’elles ne fissent aucune connoissance. Elle à toujours desiré une grande séparation du monde, et nous exhortoit à ne pas craindre de paroître un peu sauvages, c’est, disoit elle, le seul moyen de vous conserver, si vous vous montrés au monde bientôt vous prendrés son esprit, et celui de votre vocation s’affoiblira, vous donnerés dans une dissipation qui ruinera votre piété et vous écartera de vos devoirs. Elle ne le craignoit pas moins pour les Dlles qui étoient encore plus susceptibles de la vanité, mais comme c’étoit elles que l’on venoit voir il falloit bien se prêter à la curiosité du tems, au moins se faisoit elle un point de conscience de ne pas quitter les personnes qu’elles amenoit, et d’entretenir par sa présence la gravité et la modestie qu’elles devoient avoir dans ces circonstances.

(Since Saint-Cyr was a novelty, and would become a center of attraction from that moment on, the elite clamored to visit the school. Mme de Maintenon invited them often and guided their tour of the house in detail. The teachers did not appear during those visits; Mme de Maintenon did not want them to meet visitors. She always wanted to distance her teachers from society, and she urged us not to fear appearing antisocial. “It is the only way,” she would say, “to protect you. If you expose yourself to polite society, you will quickly adopt its spirit and forget your true calling, and you will give in to corruption, which will ruin your sense of piety and make you forsake your duties.” She was just as fearful for the students, who were even more prone to vanity, but since they were the ones that visitors came to see, she had no choice but to cater to the curiosity of the time. At the least, she made sure to closely monitor the visitors and to demonstrate through her example the seriousness and moderation that was appropriate in such circumstances.) ⁹

Maintenon carefully mediated interactions between her students and their visitors. She controlled the image of court culture that entered Saint-Cyr by modelling seriousness and moderation before her visitors and expecting them to follow suit. Simultaneously, she controlled the image of a parfaite education that left Saint-Cyr through the behavior her students displayed for visitors.

If Maintenon was worried about exposing the Communauté de Saint-Louis to polite society, it was because she was intimately familiar with the charms of the outside world. At the age of fifteen, a year before her marriage to Paul Scarron, Maintenon started to learn to make herself amiable under the tutelage of Antoine Gombault, chevalier de Méré, the paragon of honnêteté (genteelness). ¹⁰ Though she held her own in salon circles during her youth, the mature Maintenon regarded such conversation with a more critical eye. She confided in the duc de Noailles: “Je n’ai personne à qui parler, et ma solitude m’épargne de beaucoup de fautes; car mes conférences ne seraient ni favorables, ni glorieuses au prochain.” (I have no one to talk to, and my solitude saves me from many errors, for my conversations would not flatter nor honor those around me.) ¹¹ Similarly, in his Traité de l’Éducation des filles (Treatise on the education of girls), Fénelon deplored salon conversation as a social practice that led to gossip, frivolity, fussiness, and false feelings of superiority (vis-à-vis provincial interlocutors). ¹² Still, given the general infatuation with the practice of conversation, he knew that a governess would best capture her pupils’ attention if she presented her lessons as socially beneficial: “montrez-lui toujours l’utilité des choses que vous lui enseignez; faites-lui-en voir l’usage par rapport au commerce du monde et aux devoirs des conditions” (always show her the usefulness of your teachings; make her see how they apply in polite conversation and how they underscore her duties and status). ¹³ Maintenon took Fénelon’s reasoning a step further: her students wanted and needed to learn the art of conversation, indispensable to their noble status, so she would use salon chatting as an educational tool. Conversations with predetermined form and content would show them how to combat selfishness, applaud righteousness, and deploy raillery. By memorizing and reciting them, students would practice the principles of la raison, or the exercise of sound judgment, as opposed to l’esprit, associated with witty repartee, affected verbal eloquence, and the accumulation of empty knowledge. ¹⁴ Maintenon would use her students’ curiosity about salon culture to teach them to circumvent its dangers.

Maintenon introduced the practice of memorizing and reciting her Conversations at Saint-Cyr in 1687, the same year Fénelon published his Traité de l’Éducation des filles. In each conversation, a group of young ladies discusses, debates, and finally judges a topic concerning sociability, domestic life, or general behavior. In the manuscript transcriptions, to avoid confusion, the characters are numbered and unnamed; they systematically call each other “Mademoiselle.” As Maintenon explains:

Je n’ai fait les conversations que pour vous apprendre à vous entretenir ensemble, à savoir disputer sans vous quereller. Si tout le monde était d’abord du même avis, il n’y aurait presque rien à dire. C’est ce qui m’a fait mettre des sentiments si différents, surtout dans la conversation Du mensonge. La manière de converser ne s’apprend pas comme des notes, mais l’habitude fait qu’on l’acquiert insensiblement.

(I only wrote the conversations to teach you how to converse together, how to debate without fighting. If everyone had the same opinion to begin with, there would be almost nothing to say. That is why I brought together such different viewpoints, especially in the “Conversation on lying.” Making good conversation cannot be learned by taking notes, but through practice we can acquire these manners effortlessly.) ¹⁵

An air of politesse permeates the scripts, as is typified in the “Conversation sur l’amour proper” (Conversation on self-pride): “Ire Ne troublerons-nous point, Mademoiselle, le plaisir que vous prené alire? 2e Nullement, Mademoiselle, soyez persuadée, je vous suplie, que j’en auray un beaucoup plus grand d’être avec vous. etc.” (#1 Are we not depriving you, Miss, of the pleasure you take in reading? #2 Not at all, Miss, please rest assured that I would derive an even greater pleasure in your company, etc.) ¹⁶ More than polite small talk, the Conversations were exercises in effective communication in all manner of situations. Arguments were tolerated, as long as students chose their words correctly and exercised self-control.

The exchanges in Maintenon’s Conversations are more succinct and direct than those found in Scudéry’s novelistic Conversations. ¹⁷ In Maintenon’s “Conversation sur la raillerie” (Conversation on raillery), for instance, each speaker expresses her opinion with few words and little development:

Mlle Victoire: Je crois que voilà ce qui est le plus sûr, de railler ses amis & de vouloir qu’ils nous raillent.
Mlle Adelaïde: Tout ce que j’entends dire me confirme qu’il vaudroit encore mieux ne railler jamais.
Mlle Louise: Et moi je m’en tiendrai à railler mes amis.
Mlle Aurelie: Il faut en tout en revenir aux maximes du Christianisme.

(Miss Victoire: I think that the safest course is to gently tease our friends and to want them to tease us.
Miss Adelaïde: Everything that I have heard until now confirms that it is better not to tease at all.
Miss Louise: I, for one, would be content to only tease my friends.
Miss Aurelie: For all such questions, let us look for insight in the Christian adages.) ¹⁸

The literary historian Elizabeth Goldsmith describes Maintenon’s conversation model as a “tit-for-tat exchange of prudent remarks” that was “short, spare, and tightly organized around the topic,” and maintains that Maintenon “mistrust[ed] the free play of conversation.” ¹⁹ Goldsmith contrasts Maintenon’s scripts with Scudéry’s, which represent “ideal sociability” and favor the “pleasurable and free circulation of words.” ²⁰ Scudéry’s elegantly meandering Conversations, extracted from her novels and hundreds of pages long, were required extended reading at Saint-Cyr until its reform in 1691. Maintenon’s Conversations, on the other hand, were intended for rapid memorization and enactment, which may also explain their concision. Maintenon’s “Conversation du mensonge” (Conversation on lying), for example, is unmistakably an abridged version of Scudéry’s text of the same title. Maintenon’s Conversations were each devoted to a clearly defined topic; together, they served to indoctrinate and socially train through repetition.

The documented manner and conditions in which Maintenon’s scripts were performed at Saint-Cyr reveal that indoctrination and restraint did not preclude play. Maintenon used salon culture as a pedagogical resource to make learning enjoyable. ²¹ Recited in small groups during recess, her Conversations were intended for students’ recreation and edification. ²² Maintenon created this pastime to replace hagiographic readings, deemed too serious and boring, and readings of comedies by Molière, deemed too irreverent and amusing. ²³ Watchful of her visitors, who embodied salon culture, Maintenon filtered that culture for her students, retaining the pleasures of elegant, respectful communication and discarding trivial, vain conversation.

Maintenon’s Conversations projected a purified, youthful image of salon culture back to visitors, who delighted in witnessing these student enactments. After visiting the school, Scudéry noted the students’ enjoyment in their conversations: “Tout ce qu’on appelle recréation dans les autres Communautés où l’on élève de jeunes filles est ici admirablement bien entendu … Elles parlent avec gaieté, & se content les unes aux autres ce qui les peut divertir.” (What passes for recess in other communities that raise young girls differs from recess here, where they understand admirably well what it is for … The girls converse happily and tell each other about what they enjoy.) ²⁴ Maintenon created these scripts to teach her students “à parler juste, à propos, et d’un tour aisé et naturel dans la conversation” (to speak correctly, appropriately, and with an easy, natural air in conversation). ²⁵ Visitors appear to have taken pleasure in the easy, natural air of the students in conversation, hardly perceptible through the transcription of the words alone.

The visitors’ enjoyment may have even verged on awe. In the “Conversation sur le silence” (Conversation on silence), composed by students in Maintenon’s style, the speakers recall that a homme savant (learned man) spontaneously interjected a compliment during a previous conversation because they spoke “admirablement bien sur tout” (admirably well about everything). ²⁶ Racine perceived these exchanges as “ingenious,” presumably because he thought they were made by young people. Youth were generally expected to exercise discretion in salon gatherings, and to favor attentive silence over awkward self-expression. In his Discours des agrémens (Discourses on enchantments), the chevalier de Méré bemoaned young salonniers’ ungainliness: “un jeune homme ne sçait que fort peu de chose … il est encore Ecolier en tout: s’il parle il ne sçait ce qu’il dit, et s’il agit il ne sçait par où s’y prendre, de sorte qu’il ne faut pas s’estonner s’il a peu de grace.” (A young man knows very little … he is still a schoolboy in everything: if he speaks, he does not know what he is talking about, and if he wants to act, he does not know where to begin, so it is no surprise if he is less than elegant.) ²⁷ At Saint-Cyr, on the contrary, the young women appeared to have internalized the art of conversation that usually came with years of experience: though they were not as eloquent and as loquacious as Scudéry’s more worldly protagonists, they were more well-spoken than typical youngsters. Speakers in Maintenon’s “Conversation sur l’Éducation à Saint-Cyr” proudly proclaim, “nous disons des choses pleines d’esprit & de vérité” (we say things filled with wit and truth) and “notre esprit s’éclaire sur des choses que nous n’aurions peut-être jamais connuës, ou du moins il nous en auroit coûté une longue expérience” (our minds are enlightened about things that perhaps we never would have known, or, at the least, would have taken us years of experience to understand). ²⁸ As if by enchantment, this recreational activity transformed students into precocious society ladies.

Awe was at its height when visiting onlookers presumed that the students were extemporizing their conversations instead of reciting them. Here is where Maintenon’s sense of play begins to manifest itself. In some exchanges, the speakers acknowledge that they are reciting a text, as in the “Conversation sur l’Éducation à Saint-Cyr” where they say “nous représentons” (we are acting); the “Conversation sur le silence” where they say “nous ne parlions que parce qu’on le vouloit” (we were only conversing because we were told to do so); and the “Conversation sur la Droiture” (Conversation on rectitude) where they say “les conversations qu’on nous fait faire m’éclairent si bien sur des choses que je ne faisois qu’entrevoir” (the assigned conversations enlighten me so much about things that I only sensed before). ²⁹ In other exchanges, the speakers create the illusion that they are engaged in natural, spontaneous exchanges. The man described in the “Conversation sur le silence” was apparently caught in this illusion: “Un savant homme leur dit après les avoir entendues qu’elles parlaient admirablement bien sur tout mais qu’il ne savait si elles savaient se taire.” (After listening to the girls, a learned man said that they spoke admirably well about everything, but he was not sure if they knew how to keep quiet.) He would not have made that comment had he known that Maintenon had dictated the students’ exchange, as a speaker points out: “Il auroit eû tort, car nous ne parlions que parce qu’on le vouloit.” (He would never have thought that, had he known that we were only conversing because we were told to do so.) ³⁰ In her description of recess at Saint-Cyr, Scudéry also seems convinced that the conversations are spontaneous, for she admires the students’ mirth and makes no mention of memorization. How playful – if not slightly mischievous – of Maintenon to silently witness her visitors’ awe. The students of Saint-Cyr turned conversation into child’s play – more specifically, a children’s play that Maintenon secretly directed.

1. Madeleine de Scudéry, Nouvelles conversations de morale (Paris: Vve de S. Mabre-Cramoisy, 1688), 253–4.[↑]
2. Ms. n.a.f. 10677, Bibliothèque nationale de France, “Histoire de la Maison roiale de S. Cyr par Madame d’Eperville, eleve de Madame de Maintenon,” Constitutions de la communauté de S. Louis établie à St Cyr.[↑]
3. These include Françoise d’Aubigné, marquise de Maintenon, Mme de Maintenon, institutrice: Extraits de ses lettres, avis, entretiens, conversations et proverbes sur l’éducation, new edition, ed. Émile Faguet (Paris: H. Lecène et H. Oudin, 1887); Extraits de ses lettres, avis, entretiens, conversations et proverbes sur l’éducation: Mme de Maintenon, intro. and ed. Octave Gréard (Paris: Hachette, 1886); Conversations inédites de madame la marquise de Maintenon, intro and ed. M. de Monmerqué (Paris: J.-J. Blaise, 1828). The frequent editions of Maintenon’s writings reflect a nineteenth-century preoccupation with female instruction, with the proliferation of private religious girls’ schools in the first half of the century, the interest in early childhood and educating future mothers to raise ethical citizens in general, and the establishment of state-run public secular unisex schools in the latter part of the century.[↑]
4. Constant Venesoen, Les Loisirs de Madame de Maintenon: Étude et textes (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2011). Venesoen’s edition provides ample information on the manuscripts and publications of Maintenon’s Conversations. It compares textual passages, restores the history behind and around successive editions, and attributes editorial choices to socio-political contexts (e.g., the Jansenist upsurge during the eighteenth century, and Republican ideology following the French Revolution). Venesoen studies overarching themes and characterization, infers the relationship between Maintenon and her students, and evokes the texts’ original reception at Saint-Cyr. The student performance practice of the Conversations is less developed in his literary analysis.[↑]
5. To date, Anne Piéjus provides the most detailed and accurate information on Saint-Cyr under Maintenon’s direction in Le théâtre des demoiselles: Tragédie et musique à Saint-Cyr à la fin du Grand Siècle (Paris: Société française de Musicologie, 2000). See also Françoise Girard, “Le système éducatif à Saint-Cyr,” in Les Demoiselles de Saint-Cyr: Maison Royale d’Education (1686–1793) (Paris: Somogy, Éditions d’art, 1999), 148–67; Hélène Jacquemin, Livres et jeunes filles nobles à Saint-Cyr (1686–1793) (Angers: Presses de l’Université d’Angers, 2007); Jean-Paul Desprat, Madame de Maintenon (1636–1719) ou le prix de la réputation (Paris: Perrin, 2003); Jacques Prévot, La première institutrice de France: Madame de Maintenon (Paris: Belin Bibliothèque, 1981). Critical studies that focus on Maintenon’s Conversations include Elizabeth C. Goldsmith, “Excess and Euphoria in Madeleine de Scudéry’s Conversations,” in “Exclusive Conversations”: The Art of Interaction in Seventeenth-Century France (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988), 41–75; Carolyn C. Lougee, “Noblesse, Domesticity, and Social Reform: The Education of Girls by Fénelon and Saint-Cyr,” in History of Education Quarterly 14, no. 1 (Spring 1974): 87–113.[↑]
6. “Lettre à Mme du Pérou, datée du 27 février 1693,” in Françoise d’Aubigné, marquise de Maintenon, Lettres historiques et édifiantes, ed. Théophile Lavallée (Paris: Charpentier, 1856), 1: 276.[↑]
7. Lougee, “Noblesse,” 103.[↑]
8. The Correspondance of Madame, Princess Palatine, Mother of the Regent; Marie-Adelaide de Savoie, Duchesse de Bourgogne; and of Madame de Maintenon, in Relation to Saint-Cyr, trans. Katharine Prescott Wormeley (Boston: Hardy, Pratt, 1899), 283–4: “[addressing the students of the Green grade level at Saint-Cyr in 1702] I am glad when I see you sweeping and rubbing the floors of the church, because it is good for your health … I do not understand why you should object to sweeping; it makes you strong … I can understand perfectly well that beggars reclothed … should not venture to touch the ground with the tips of their fingers; but nobles do not think such things beneath them.”[↑]
9. Two upublished volumes titled Mémoires de ce qui s’est passé de plus remarquable depuis l’établissement de la Maison de Saint-Cyr, presumably written by one or more teachers at Saint-Cyr, have been preserved at the municipal library of Versailles under the call number Rés. F 629–30, 1–2. According to the “Avant-Propos,” the contents of these “memoirs,” which function rather as school archives, follow closely the notes left behind by Catherine Travers du Pérou, the first headmistress at Saint-Cyr. The manuscript could not have been written by Mme du Pérou, who died in 1748 at the age of eighty-three, for in them is mentioned Les Loisirs de Mme de Maintenon, the title of the first edition of Maintenon’s conversations, published in 1757. Thus I will hereafter refer to Mémoires de ce qui s’est passé de plus remarquable depuis l’établissement de la Maison de Saint-Cyr as Rés. F 629–30 and their author as Anonymous (Anon.). Anon., Rés. F 629–30, 1: 67.[↑]
10. Edmond Chamaillard, Le chevalier de Méré, rival de Voiture, ami de Pascal, précepteur de Mme de Maintenon (Niort: G. Clouzot, 1921).[↑]
11. Yolanda Viñas del Palacio, “La Correspondance de Madame de Maintenon ou l’art de ‘se contrarier,'” in Madame de Maintenon, une femme de lettres?, eds. Christine Mongenot and Marie-Emmanuelle Plagnol-Diéval (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2012), 61–2.[↑]
12. François de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon, “Traité de l’éducation des filles,” in Oeuvres complètes (Paris: J. Leroux et Jouby, 1851), 5: ch. 5, 8, 10, 11, 13, http://athena.unige.ch/athena/fenelon/fenelon_education_filles.html.[↑]
13. Fénelon, Oeuvres complètes, ch. 5.[↑]
14. See Rés. F 629–30, 1: 57; Jacquemin, Livres et jeunes filles nobles, 142.[↑]
15. This citation is found in Prévot, La première institutrice de France, 220. Regrettably, Prévot does not accurately specify its source. He implies that it is found in Rés. F 629–30; however, that source does not contain the citation in question. I have not been able to locate this passage in either the manuscript or the edited versions of Maintenon’s Instructions aux classes[↑]
16. “Conversation sur l’amour proper,” in Histoire de la Maison roiale de S. Cyr par Madame d’Eperville, élève de Madame de Maintenon, où l’on voit des anecdotes sur cette dame et sur Louis XIV, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Ms. n.a.f. 10677, fol. 77.[↑]
17. Madeleine de Scudéry, Chroniques du samedi, suivies de pièces diverses, 1653–1654, eds. Alain Niderst, Delphine Denis, and Myriam Maître (Paris: H. Champion, 2002); Conversations morales, 2 vols. (Paris: sur le quay des Augustins, à la descente du Pont-neuf, à l’image Saint-Louis, 1686); Conversations nouvelles sur divers sujets, dédiées au Roy, 2 vols. (Paris: Claude Barbin, 1684); Conversations sur divers sujets, 2 vols. (Paris: Claude Barbin, au Palais, sur le Perron de la Sainte Chapelle, 1680); “De l’air galant” et autres Conversations (1653–1684): Pour une étude de l’archive galante, ed. Delphine Denis (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1998); “Les Jeux servant de preface à Mathilde,” in Mathilde (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1979); Nouvelles conversations de morale (Paris: Vve de S. Mabre-Cramoisy, 1688 [1667]).[↑]
18. Françoise d’Aubigné, marquise de Maintenon, Les Loisirs de Madame de Maintenon (Paris: Duchesne, 1757), 152. All of the speakers in this and subsequent editions are named, unlike the numbered speakers in the original manuscripts, presumably to facilitate their reading. I have cited this first edited version of the “Conversation de la raillerie” because I have not found an original manuscript of it.[↑]
19. Goldsmith, “Excess and Euphoria,” 69; 67–8; 68.[↑]
20. Ibid., 68; 69.[↑]
21. Maintenon also composed skits that illustrated proverbs and offered moral lessons for her students to act out during recess, a practice not unlike the “Jeu des Histoires ou fables racontées sur chaque Proverbe” (Game of storytelling based on the proverbs). Charles Sorel describes this common salon game in his Recréations galantes (Cambridge, MA: Omnisys, 1990 [1672]), 98–9. See Proverbes dramatiques: Madame de Maintenon, eds. Perry Gethner and Theresa Varney Kennedy (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2014). [↑]
22. Jean Racine, Esther (Paris: D. Thierry, 1689): “On leur met, pour ainsi dire, à profit leurs heures de recreations. On leur fait faire entre elles sur leurs principaux devoirs des conversations ingenieuses, qu’on leur a composées expres, ou qu’elles composent sur le champ.” (They are made to take advantage, so to speak, of recess time. They are supposed to engage among themselves in clever conversations on their principal duties, conversations which are composed especially for them, or that they create spontaneously.) Ms. n.a.f. 10678, Mémoire de ce qui s’observe dans la royale maison de Saint-Louis, fol. 7: “Il faut diversifier leurs instructions, les faire courtes parce qu’elles sont fréquentes, et même les égayer souvent, il faut se servir de tout jusques dans leurs jeux pour former leur raison.” (We must vary their lessons, make them shorter because there are so many of them, and even make many of them enjoyable; we must make use of everything, even their games, to forge their sense of judgment.) [↑]
23. Rés. F 629–30, 1: 60–1. [↑]
24. Scudéry, “Description de Saint-Cyr,” in Nouvelles conversations, 1: 263.[↑]
25. Rés. F. 629–30, 1: 70.[↑]
26. Ms. n.a.f. 10677, Histoire de la Maison roiale de S. Cyr par Madame d’Eperville, fol. 77.[↑]
27. Antoine Gombault, chevalier de Méré, “Discours des Agrémens,” in Œuvres complètes du chevalier de Méré, ed. Charles-H. Boudhors (Paris: Fernand Roches, 1930), 2: 36.[↑]
28. Maintenon, Les Loisirs de Madame de Maintenon, 180.[↑]
29. Ibid.; Ms. n.a.f. 10677, Histoire de la Maison roiale de S. Cyr par Madame d’Eperville, fol. 77; Maintenon, Les Loisirs de Madame de Maintenon, 136.[↑]
30. Ms. n.a.f. 10677, Histoire de la Maison roiale de S. Cyr par Madame d’Eperville, fol. 77.[↑]