The story of M

摘要

As the Marquise de Maintenon-mis-tress and for 30-odd years morganatic wife of Louis XIV-lay dying in 1719, in the tranquil setting of Saint-Cyr, a charitable institution she had set up for the education of impoverished young noblewomen, she must have reflected on what surely counts as one of the most extraordinary rags-to-riches stories of all time. She herself had described her life as a miracle.rnBorn Francoise d'Aubigne in a prison in Niort, in western France, in 1635, she was the unwanted daughter of Constant d'Aubigne, an improvident and unscrupulous minor nobleman. D'Aubigne had been condemned as a traitor and a murderer, and he continued throughout his life to exchange his Protestant faith for the Catholic as circumstances dictated in a period of great religious unrest. Her mother, Jeanne de Cardilhac, a Catholic, was the daughter of d'Aubigne's former jailer.