The Sun King’s Mistress
Madame de Maintenon, famed mistress and secret wife of Louis XIV was born Françoise d’Aubigné in a prison, the daughter of a drunkard and swindler. She was married first at the age of sixteen to the legless and lecherous writer Paul Scarron. “I would rather marry him than enter a convent,” she observed. Later she got a job as governess to the illegitimate children that Louis XIV had fathered with another mistress. With a gift of 100,000 livres from the King, she bought a chateau at Maintenon, took the title of marquise and when the Queen of France died in 1683, just after the court had moved to Versailles, she moved effortlessly into the regal vacancy. John Rogister, who tells this story of horizontal influence and upward mobility in this week's TLS, is reviewing the Marquise's letters, which show, apparently, that she was not as much of an adviser to her secret royal husband as her enemies had long claimed. More proof is needed before that case can be made, he says. There were only a few intimate friends among her early correspondents, as well as leading political and ecclesiastical figures, and an impressive number of nuns. This first volume deals with the formative years of Madame de Maintenon at court and scholars will have to wait for the others to see how her influence developed. By the end of the reign, when the King himself was full of aches and pains, she was a brooding presence alongside his stubbly but still imperious profile, seldom rising from her chair when the great were received in audience.
Enlightenment Journeys through India
To be a British governor's wife in the Indian empire could sometimes require great courage and political skill. But in the early years of the nineteenth century there were too many aristocrats and too little that was suitable for them to do. So in March 1800 Lady Henrietta Clive, wife of the governor of Madras, decided to set out on a thousand-mile tour of south India and to send back letters and journals, that have finally been used now by Nancy K. Shields to tell her story. Birds of Passage is not a tale of derring-deeds but the trip certainly showed some fine style. A retinue of more than 750 people accompanied the party. With her went not only her two teenage daughters, Harriet and Charlotte, and their governess, the artist Signora Anna Tonelli, but fourteen elephants, a hundred bullocks, “message camels” (four-legged postmen), soldiers, cooks, maids, palanquin bearers, tent superintendents, interpreters, all her servants, (“for traveling in India is not like traveling in Europe, as we were obliged to take every article for cooking, etc”), the servants' wives and the higher-caste servants' own cooks too. Planning the expedition must have taken months, although, as Rosie Llewellyn-Jones writes in the TLS, this is not referred to in Henrietta’s journal or letters. She expected to find food and accommodation prepared for her at every halt, and so it was, throughout the seven-month journey. Sometimes Henrietta and the girls slept in tented enclosures, guarded by sentinels, and at others in specially built temporary wooden “bungalows,” or in choultries, semi-open halls for travellers. Arriving at Bangalore, the party spent two months in an old palace that provided a delightful retreat during the worst of the summer heat. Although uninhabited for nearly a decade, the palace rooms were still glowing with flowered murals, and in the courtyard gardens fruit trees and rose bushes were found running wild.
Yeats’s Greek Obsessions
In the minds of Irish-nationalist men of letters, around the end of the nineteenth century and the earlier years of the twentieth, there existed a special affinity between Ireland and ancient Greece. There might even be a shared mission. According to Patrick Pearse, who headed the Easter Rising in 1916, “what the Greek was to the ancient world the Gael will be to the modern.” Above all, though, the sense of affinity rested on the perceived kinship between traditions of heroic poetry and myth. For the historian Standish O’Grady, the Irish heroic age surpassed even the Homeric. Equations of figures from the two traditions were common. Michael Silk considers this special relationship through W. B. Yeats’s translations of Sophocles. From the founding of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin in 1904, Yeats and his fellow directors, J. M. Synge and Lady Gregory, planned to include Greek plays in the repertoire. Yeats’s own dramatic works eventually included two “versions” of Sophoclean plays, Sophocles’ King Oedipus (staged in 1926 and published, with that title, in 1928) and Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus (staged in 1927 and published in 1934). A new edition of the manuscript materials for Oedipus at Colonus, edited by Jared Curtis, reveals the complexity of this process, “assimilations but also distancing” and a striking self-effacement by Yeats as he rendered issues such as old age which were of deep concern to himself. Comparison of different versions of the lyrics shows a tightening grip on the dynamics of the original Greek drama itself.
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Peter Stothard's latest book is On the Spartacus Road: A Spectacular Journey Through Ancient Italy. He is also the author of Thirty Days, a Downing Street diary of his time with British Prime Minister Tony Blair during the Iraq war.
