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The Precarious Lives of Women in Madame de Maintenon’s Proverbes dramatiques

The precarity of young women’s lives is depicted in the Proverbes dramatiques (1690-1701), short sketches illustrating French proverbs that Madame de Maintenon composed for the female pupils who boarded at the school she and Louis XIV, King of France, had built in Saint-Cyr. Maintenon’s dramatic proverbs highlight the risks that these young women faced in seventeenth-century France, including kidnapping. Throughout the proverbs, Maintenon’s advice offered women a degree of agency in preparing for their futures. Although she did not argue for a direct reversal of the patriarchal hierarchy, Maintenon’s proverbs taught young women how to create a quality existence within the confines of a precarious world that privileged men.