All We Know: Three Lives (12 page)

Esther is the voice of history in the book. As their train navigates a vertiginously steep “side of the Western Sierra Madre,” she muses, sanguine, to Sybille’s terror: “I believe this is a very great engineering feat…We had the same problem in the Rocky Mountains. No rail-bed can take that kind of stress long. You remember the Colorado Pass Rail Wreck in ’39?” During and after their trip, she educated Sybille about Maximilian and Carlota, the perpetrators and victims of one of the European maneuvers for Mexico, who were made emperor and empress of the country in 1864. Esther stands for Northern liberalism, declaring to a Republican lady from Virginia long resident in Mexico, “My father voted for Woodrow Wilson twice; I cast my first vote for James Cox against the unfortunate Harding; I voted for John W. Davis against Coolidge…Personally, Mrs Rawlston, I am a strong Roosevelt woman.” She represents North American impatience in the face of “Latin” modes of life and work. She is the New World to Sybille’s Old. “‘I am an American,’ said E. in an uncertain tone…‘I am an American. I will not be pushed around.’” Yet her consciousness of European history never leaves her. At the miraculously peaceful establishment presided over by “Don Otavio,” where they stayed for several months, she marveled at their host: “‘Don Otavio,’ said E., ‘you must have seen great changes. Like a man born in France in 1770.’”

Getting stuck in the secret passage of a convent is an apt metaphor for Esther’s writing impasse. But lodging with Don Otavio, she was transformed: She ate well, gained weight, drank in moderation, and at siesta time would pace “swinging a small stick, the single upright figure during the slow hours…composing step by step, clause by clause the periods of an exegesis of one of the more incomprehensible personages of seventeenth-century France.” Here, although she was not writing, she was composing, in her head or out loud. The personage in question was Madame de Maintenon, however, not Pompadour. During their first summer in Mexico, their luggage had been stolen, and along with her suitcase and briefcase (both from Mark Cross), Esther lost her notes on Madame de Pompadour, as well as most of her clothes and a precious bundle of letters from her father. It was on one of those afternoons chez Don Otavio that Sybille was seized by the idea for a book that blended the history of Mexico, travelogue, memoir, and invention, a comedy about some of the tragedies of history.

They put off their return for months—at times because Sybille wanted to see more of the country, at others because they did not have the return fare or a place to live in New York—finally flew back in March  1947, and spent several difficult, impoverished months in the city while Esther tried to sort out her life. She negotiated with Gerald about Mark Cross and met with an insistent Chester, who had arrived from California wanting money and to reunite—or at least not to lose her to a woman. Sybille was under pressure to return to France before her visa expired, but she suspected that Esther was being treated unfairly by her family and felt that she could not leave her to manage her finances and Chester alone. Esther had at some point agreed to send Chester funds every month and, with Sybille’s help, had mailed him several checks from Mexico. She wanted nothing to do with him, but was frightened of his vindictiveness in the event of a divorce and was used to ignoring what she hoped was not true. So she met with him almost daily, sometimes with Sybille and sometimes alone, at a bar on Sixth Avenue halfway between their apartment and his hotel. She and Sybille finally found passage to Europe on a converted troopship. Margaret Marshall “staged” a “mad farewell party” for them, and they sailed on June 9, 1947. Allanah Harper met them when they arrived at Le Havre ten days later. Sybille was thirty-six, Esther almost fifty years old.

During that first long, hot summer in France, which followed the coldest winter in Europe for years, Esther moved between the Hotel des Saints-Pères, an old Bloomsbury haunt near Saint-Germain-des-Prés, and Noel Murphy’s house in Orgeval. Sybille was often with old friends from Sanary who were now living on a farm in the Touraine, who then invited Esther as well: “She came, she stayed, she spellbound her hosts,” Sybille wrote, “with her broad evocations of French and American history delivered in an oratorical voice in near flawless French with a heavy not disagreeable accent, while she vaguely stirred about the
noisette de porc aux pruneaux
congealing on her plate.” Meals continued for hours, while Esther talked and failed to eat. Janet Flanner and Noel—separated for most of the war and now involved in a complicated pas de trois with Flanner’s new lover, Natalia Danesi Murray—also came to visit.

Sybille later described that homecoming to Europe as “part jubilant…part traumatic.” Part of the trauma was that almost immediately on their arrival Esther became embroiled in romantic complications of her own, succumbing to the manipulative attentions of a woman who had once been entangled with Sybille and whose lover was now leaving her for Allanah Harper. Esther was “infatuated with her,” she wrote when it was over, “and flattered by her infatuation for me.” The result was two years of confusion, equivocating about her commitment to Sybille, and melodrama among the five of them: Esther, Sybille, Allanah, and the other two women. Neither Esther nor Sybille was writing. When Sybille left for Italy that autumn, Esther stayed behind, vacillating—her inability to follow Sybille, whom she loved, akin to her inability to focus on her book.

Over the next two years, she promised to join Sybille, and they spent stretches of time together in Rome, Florence, Ischia, and Capri. In 1949, she agreed to lecture at the Italian American Institute in Rome about “the twenty years preceding the Civil War, roughly from 1840 to 1861 (annexation of Texas, Missouri Compromise, ‘Free Soil’ policy, constitutional issue on slavery, Lincoln, birth of the Republican party). Tell them not to be alarmed, I can and
have
done it in an hour.” But she always returned to France and romantic entanglement with a woman she did not particularly like or respect. “I have played fast and loose with our relationship,” she wrote to Sybille, “and I would not blame you at all if you felt that my conduct has killed something in it that cannot be revived.” Sybille, increasingly frustrated by Esther’s “clouds of talk,” began immersing herself in the book that became
Don Otavio
, working with the urgent knowledge that she had to commit herself to a writing life and accepting that Esther would never settle down to disciplined composition. From Ischia she wrote to an old friend, “E. is now an almost impossible person to live with because she is absolutely idle, and I fear will remain so…One must not put the blame on the other person. But I feel I cannot go on with this and must make myself another existence somehow.”

“I love you really at last, the way I should have loved you always” Esther wrote in the spring of 1950. “But everything comes too late or too soon.” By then, Sybille had decided to settle in Rome and had met someone else; Esther stayed on in Paris. Sybille remained her closest friend for the rest of her life and was the “
only
person,” in Noel Murphy’s view, whom Esther allowed to influence her behavior. “Next to my father and Muriel Draper,” Esther wrote to Sybille in 1957, “I owe more to you than to any human being I have known.”

Allanah Harper, walking into Esther’s room at the Hotel des Saints-Pères in October 1950, found a “table…covered in notes on Madame de Pompadour or is it Maintenon, now?”

Thus begins the principle exhibit in the case for Esther Murphy’s failure: her unfinished study of Madame de Maintenon, born Françoise d’Aubigné.

There are several undated drafts of this project on which Esther spent at least the last fifteen years of her life. One version, probably the earliest, is written in an Italian notebook decorated with fleurs-de-lis. The rest are a collection of loose pages—type- and handwritten, incomplete, inconsistently paginated, now disordered. Although there are differences among the drafts, most revisit the same material, sometimes word for word. All are punctuated idiosyncratically. All are dense with citation. All begin with the secret wedding ceremony. The version written in the Italian notebook ends with the baptism of the infant Françoise d’Aubigné. The loose pages do not progress beyond her marriage at age sixteen to the writer Paul Scarron.

The material in the notebook is headed:

She subtitled the first section “The Sublime Governess.” She used three lines from  T. S. Eliot’s “Gerontion” as her first epigraph: “History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors / And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions, / Guides us by vanities.” A second epigraph is from the eighteenth-century Huguenot writer Laurent Angliviel de La Beaumelle: “With respect to Madame de Maintenon who was regarded at Saint Cyr as a saint, at the court as a hypocrite, in Paris as a person of intellect and in all the rest of Europe as a woman without morals; I have let the facts speak for themself.”

Esther focused first, as these lines from La Beaumelle suggest, on Maintenon’s reputation. The eighteenth-century memoirist the Duc de Saint-Simon called her “‘the famous and fatal Madame de Maintenon,’” she wrote, “and…pursues [her] with peculiar malevolence.” She summarized the general low opinion of her subject by citing the writer Émile Henriot (her own contemporary): “Madame de Maintenon n’a pas bon[ne] presse.” (Madame de Maintenon gets a bad rap.) She also focused on Maintenon’s eventful, difficult childhood and on the extravagant reverses and advances of her life:

Maintenon’s prehistory—her Huguenot forebears, the religious wars of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century France, and the relationship of both to the dance of power during the reign of Louis XIV and before—is another thread of Esther’s narrative. This was the bloody, irrational tale that fascinated her as much as Maintenon herself did: the traumas of “a century that was almost as sinister as our own.” In 1534, shortly after Jean Calvin fled France for Geneva, a third of the French population were Huguenots, and “there seemed to be nothing that could stop the progress of Calvinism in France.” The Catholic attempt “to exterminate the Huguenots,” Esther wrote, turned into “a civil war of unparalleled ferocity, that was to divide, devastate and exhaust France for thirty-six years; to leave after it a fatal legacy of malice and hatred; and to prepare the way for the absolute monarchy.”

Françoise d’Aubigné’s great-grandfather, Jean d’Aubigné, was one of those converts to Protestantism. Her grandfather, Théodore-Agrippa d’Aubigné, was a famous Huguenot soldier, poet, and scholar, a leader during those civil wars. But her mother was a devout Catholic, and Françoise was manipulated throughout her childhood to fight small versions of the battles between the Catholic Church and French Protestants. Her father, Constant d’Aubigné, was a gambler, rapist, murderer, forger, and counterfeiter who “changed his religion whenever he thought it expedient to do so”; betrayed his father to the French government; “was sentenced to death three times”; spent much of his life in prison; and deserted his second wife, Jeanne de Cardillhac, the daughter of one of his jailors, when he was released from prison. Jeanne had Françoise baptized a Catholic, but the child was soon adopted by her Huguenot aunt Madame de Villette, because of her parents’ desperate circumstances. Growing up with this woman, Françoise “became a fervent protestant—a fact,” Esther wrote, “that some of her Catholic biographers have attempted to deny.” However, “extremely precocious, she showed great theological independence and she refused to subscribe to the doctrine of eternal punishment, the cornerstone of Calvinism. ‘You will see that God will change his mind, and that he will put out the flames of hell’: she said when she [was] seven years old.”

After then living with her mother for several unhappy years—including a time on the Caribbean island of Marie Galante—Françoise was adopted by a distant relation, Madame de Neuillant, who treated her as an unpaid servant and attempted to restore her to Catholicism. Madame de Neuillant’s crusade was motivated by her desire to find favor with the monarchy and was part of the uneasy pre-Revolutionary negotiations between the aristocracy and the Crown. But “exposed to all the winds of doctrine,” Françoise still refused to renounce her faith, so Madame de Neuillant sent her to an Ursuline convent, hoping that the nuns would be more persuasive. There, wrote Esther, the girl

By the time Madame de Neuillant sent her to another convent, this time in Paris, her case had become notorious: She was the granddaughter of the Huguenot hero Agrippa d’Aubigné and “was not an ordinary girl of fourteen,” Esther wrote. “She had intellectual powers of a very uncommon kind and a will of iron.” At this convent she met another special nun—humane, intelligent, and

She based her decision, it seems, on the principle of correct citation. Noting her subject’s later silence about the event and the few other sources on it, Esther asked, “Did she grow weary of the unequal struggle and decide at last that God was on the side of the heaviest battalions and that it was better to be a Catholic than a protestant in France? Did she realize that the French reformation was one of the greatest failures in history and did she dislike failure? We have no satisfactory answers to these questions.”

Madame de Neuillant then married Françoise d’Aubigné to the comic writer Paul Scarron, who was an invalid many years her senior. She had been mistreated by Madame de Neuillant, and “the age was notoriously unsentimental about matrimony, nevertheless it was generally regarded at the time as a marriage that could only have been made by a young girl who was extremely cold-blooded and not very delicate,” wrote Esther. “The opinion has persisted ever since.” There is no record of the ceremony, which took place in April 1652, “and it is believed that it was destroyed after Madame de Maintenon married Louis XIV.” She spent her wedding night nursing her husband, who was in excruciating pain “that could only be partially alleviated by doses of opium.”

So ends the longest version of Esther’s manuscript.

What she left out, in brief: That the poet, playwright, and novelist Scarron educated his young wife and introduced her to the brilliant company he kept, and Françoise, now Madame Scarron, became one of the attractions of his salon. Scarron died when Françoise was in her mid-twenties, leaving her with culture and connections but no money. After some years of struggle, friends at court helped her obtain a royal sinecure. Madame Scarron became close to salonnières and aristocrats, including Mademoiselle de Scudéry, Madame de Sévigné, and Madame de Montespan, and she did not succumb, or she did, to the advances of various admirers. In 1670, Madame de Montespan, then the king’s favorite mistress, asked Madame Scarron to become the secret governess to Montespan’s children with him. Madame Scarron’s learning and discretion were admired, and several years later, when Louis XIV legitimized these royal bastards, she accompanied the children to court. She became indispensable, as they say, to the king and was involved in a long power struggle with Montespan. The king gave her the château of Maintenon (or the money to purchase it) and, as a further sign of favor, created her the “Marquise de Maintenon.”

For the next several decades, Madame de Maintenon was a focus of political intrigue and questions about her access to policymaking. The extent of her influence on Louis XIV is still debated. She is generally held to have been powerful especially regarding religious matters—meaning both the politics of the day, from which religion was inseparable, and the king’s own spirituality, including his late-in-life turn to God after decades of licentiousness. Her own increasingly fervent Catholicism included entanglement in offshoots of doctrine (such as Jansenism and Quietism), which endangered both her own position at court and the monarchy itself, because of Louis XIV’s tenuous relationship with Rome. She urged conversion on her Huguenot relatives and essentially kidnapped a niece and raised her a Catholic. For many years she was loathed by Protestants and said to have been responsible for the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, the treaty of toleration of Protestants in France that her grandfather had helped broker—an accusation that has now been discredited. (Esther indicates in passing that Louis XIV made this decision with Maintenon’s approval.) It is believed that Maintenon urged Louis XIV to renounce his mistresses and reconcile with his wife (which he did), even as she continued her intimacy with him. Her marriage to the king followed shortly after the queen’s death in July 1683.

She was indisputably a powerful educator, making something of herself and of other women through self-instruction and teaching. In the early 1680s, she founded a school for the daughters of impoverished aristocrats as an alternative to the convent. The school was eventually established at Saint-Cyr, near Versailles, and the excellence of its curriculum was widely acknowledged: It served as a model for women’s education in France, inspiring the founding of other secular institutions. From Racine, then Louis XIV’s official historian, she commissioned two plays on biblical themes—
Esther
and
Athalie
—for the students. Their performances before the court were such successes, inviting courtiers’ excessive attention to the students and dangerous rumors about the girls’ chastity, that to save the students’ reputations, the school’s, and her own, Madame de Maintenon was forced to transform Saint-Cyr into a religious institution, subject to the relatively liberal Order of St. Augustine. She devoted enormous energy to the school, and her lectures to the faculty and students, the dramatic dialogues (“Conversations”) and proverb plays she composed for the young women, and her correspondence (thousands of letters, first published in the nineteenth century and thought by some to rival those of Madame de Sévigné) are a remarkable and still underread part of French literature. After the king’s death in 1715, she left Versailles and retreated to Saint-Cyr, where she died on April 15, 1719.

All of these cunning passages were part of Esther’s monologues about the sublime governess. But they did not make it into print.

When Nancy Mitford, who had become a close friend of Esther’s, decided to write about Madame de Pompadour, she asked and received Esther’s permission to do so and borrowed many of Esther’s books, carting them back and forth between their Paris apartments. It is probable that Esther had already abdicated the Pompadour project. It seems clear that she was not troubled by feelings of ownership of her subject, or by the paranoia about priority that often afflicts biographers. Several years earlier she had written that her work on Pompadour was foundering on her attempt to tell the story of that intensely political woman in the context of the world war of her day. “The writing is going well—better than I expected,” she reported to Chester in 1943, “but I have tackled something…that was much bigger than I bargained for—the political implications of the Seven Years War and the whole change that took place on the face of the world are not going to be easy and I have had to revise my outline considerably.”