Maintenon, Madame de

Maintenon, Madame de [née Françoise d'Aubigné] (1635–1719), second wife of Louis XIV, whom she married secretly in about 1684. Her first husband was the dramatist Scarron, on whose household and dramatic works she had a salutary effect. Her ascendancy over the Court was held to be largely responsible for the austerity which resigned there during the 1680s and 1690s, when, in contrast to the encouragement earlier given to Molière and others, the public theatre came in for severe disapproval, the King even banishing the actors from the Comédie-Italienne in 1697 for having put on La Fausse Prude by Étienne Lenoble, which offended her. Private theatricals, however, were another matter, and Madame de Maintenon not only persuaded Racine, after 12 years' abstention from the theatre, to write the poetic and religious dramas Esther (1689) and Athalie (1691) for performance at her school in Saint-Cyr for impoverished young ladies, but herself composed for them a number of one-act sketches illustrating well-known proverbs, a type of entertainment very popular in society at the time and later made famous by Alfred de Musset. These, preserved in manuscript, were not published until 1820.