1702. memoirs of madame de Maintenon. — 33% 
MEMOIRS OF THE FIRST YEARS OF THE LIFE OF THE 
CELEBRATED MADAME DE MAINTENON, 
Or all the instances that occur in the history of Europe 
of great changes of fortune, no one is more surprising than 
those that respect madame de Maintenon; who, after a va- 
riety of adventures, that would be reckoned extravagantly 
absurd in a novel, became the wife of the greatest mo- 
natch at that time in Europe. What follows is a slight 
fketch of her parentage and history, during the early peri- 
od of her life. . 
‘ Frances d’Aubigné, grand- dakpbees to Theodore Agrip. 
pa d’Aubigné who distinguifhed himself in the civil wars, 
and of mademoiselle de Cardillac, was born on the 27th of 
November 1635, in the prison of Niort, in which her fa- 
ther was at that time confined, on account of his imprudent 
conduct, and in which his wife, a prudent and virtuous 
woman, had fhut herself up with him. 
‘ Madame de Villette, sister to the hufband, came to vi= 
sit the lying-in woman, and beheld them in all the hor- 
rors of indigence ; her brother deprived of reason by des- 
pair, and emaciated by hunger; their eldest child wrapped 
in rags, and already sensible of the miseries of her condi- 
tion; their second in the cradle, a girl two days old, 
who, by her cries, seemed to invite death; the mother 
weeping, and offe:ing her breasts, sometimes to her hus- 
band, sometimes to her daughter, but hopelefs of saving 
either the one or the other, as distrefs and hunger had 
dried up her milk, and the was unable to pay a nuxse.> 
‘ Abstracting from this description, whatever it may be 
supposed to owe to the imagination of the author, we may 
still conclude, that, at her birth, Frances d’Aubigné was ex- 
posed to extreme misery. Madame de Villette, took her 
