sobriety. In certain respects she judged him with much intelligence, and with freer and broader good sense than he was capable of himself; she thought him ignorant in many ways, and she was right. What she valued most in him was his uprightness of feeling, and the accuracy of his coup-d’œil when left to himself; also the quality of his mind, the charm of his intercourse, the excellent expression of his thoughts,—it was, in short, a certain loftiness of nature which attracted and charmed her in Louis XIV. She aided more than any other in consoling him and diverting his mind after the death of the Duchesse de Bourgogne; she went to him every evening at the permitted hour, and she saw that he was pleased with her company. “There is no one but Madame who does not leave me now,” said Louis XIV. “I see that she is glad to be with me.” Madame has ingenuously expressed the sort of open and sincere affection that she felt for Louis XIV. by saying: “If the king had been my father I could not have loved him more than I did love him, and I had pleasure in being with him.” When the king’s health declined and he neared his last hour, we find Madame laying bare her grief in her letters; she, whose son was about to become regent, she dreads more than any one the change of reign. “The king is not well,” she says, August 15, 1715, “and it troubles me to the point of being half ill myself; I have lost both sleep and appetite. God grant I may be mistaken! but if what I fear should happen it would be for me the greatest of misfortunes.” She relates the last scenes of farewell with true and visible emotion. The little good that has been done in the final years of that long reign she attributes to Louis XIV.; and all that was bad she imputes to her whom she considers an evil genius and the devil personified,—to Mme. de Maintenon.

And here we come to Madame’s great antipathy, to what in her is almost unimaginable prejudice, hatred, and animosity so violent that they become at times comical. And truly, if Madame at a given moment had really been in love with Louis XIV., and if she had hated in Mme. de Maintenon the rival who supplanted her, she could not have expressed herself otherwise. But there is no need of that sort of explanation for a nature so easy to prejudice, so difficult to placate, and so wholly in opposition and contrast to the point of departure and proceedings of Mme. de Maintenon. Hers were antipathies of race, of condition, of temperament, which long years passed in the presence, the continual sight, the rigid restraint of their object only cultivated, secretly fomented, and exasperated. Who has not seen such long-suppressed enmities which explode when an opening is made for them?

Madame, pre-eminently princess of a sovereign house, who never, with all her natural human qualities and her free and easy ways, forgot the duties of birth and grandeur, she of whom it was said, “No great personage ever knew her rights better or made them better felt by others,”—Madame held nothing in so much horror and contempt as misalliances. The gallery at Versailles long echoed with the resounding blow she applied to her son on the day when, having consented to marry the natural daughter of Louis XIV., he approached his mother according to custom, to kiss her hand. Now of all misalliances what could be greater or more inexcusable to her eyes than that which placed Mme. de Maintenon beside Louis XIV.?

Madame, natural, frank, letting her feelings willingly escape her, liking to pour them out, often in excess beyond themselves and observing no caution, could not away with the cold procedure, prudent, cautious, mysterious, polite, and unassailable, of a person to whom she attributed a thousand schemes blacker and deeper than those of hell.

She disliked her for little things and disliked her for great ones. She supposed that it was Mme. de Maintenon who, in concert with Père de La Chaise, had plotted and carried through the persecution of the Reformers; in this she was not only human, but she found herself once more a little of a Calvinist or a Lutheran with a touch of the old leaven; she thought close at hand what the refugees in Holland were writing from afar. She believed she saw in Mme. de Maintenon a Tartuffe in a sage-coloured gown. And besides—another grievance almost as serious!—if there was no longer any etiquette at Court, if ranks were no longer preserved and defined, Mme. de Maintenon was the cause of it.

“There is no longer a Court in France,” she writes, “and it is the fault of the Maintenon, who, finding that the king would not declare her queen, was determined there should be no more great functions, and has persuaded the young dauphine [the Duchesse de Bourgogne] to stay in her, Mme. de Maintenon’s rooms, where there is no distinction of rank or dignity. Under pretext of its being a game, the old woman has induced the dauphine and the princesses to wait upon her at her toilet and meals; she has even persuaded them to hand her the dishes, change her plates, and pour what she drank. Everything is topsy-turvy, and none of them know their right place nor what they are. I have never mixed myself up in all that: when I go to see the lady I place myself close to her niche in an armchair, and I never help her either at her meals or her toilet. Some persons have advised me to do as the dauphine and the princesses do, but I answer: ‘I was never brought up to do servile things, and I am too old to play childish games.’ Since then no one has said anything more about it.”

I should never end if I enumerated all the reasons by which Madame brought herself, gradually and insensibly, to a species of mania which seizes her whenever she has to speak of Mme. de Maintenon, for there are no terms that she does not employ about her. On this subject she drops into whatever the grossest popular credulity could imagine in its days of madness; she sees in Mme. de Maintenon, even after the death of Louis XIV. and while buried at Saint-Cyr, a monopolist of wheat, a poisoner expert in the art of a Brinvilliers, a Gorgon, an incendiary who sets fire to the château de Lunéville. And after she has exhausted everything, she adds: “All the evil that has been said of this diabolical woman is still below the truth.” She applies to her an old German proverb: “Where the devil can’t go himself he sends an old woman.” Saint-Simon, inflamed as he is, pales beside this fabulous hatred, and has himself told us the secret of it.

One day, on a memorable occasion, Madame found herself humiliated before Mme. de Maintenon, forced to admit a wrong she had done her, to make her excuses before witnesses, and to say she was gratefully obliged to her. This happened on the death of Monsieur (June, 1701). Madame, who at that serious crisis had everything to obtain from the king both for herself and for her son (and did in fact obtain it), made the effort to lay her dignity aside and address herself to Mme. de Maintenon. The latter went to see her, and in presence of the Duchesse de Ventadour as witness, she represented to Madame, after listening to her, that the king had much reason to complain of her, but was willing to overlook it all. Madame, believing herself quite safe, protested her innocence; Mme. de Maintenon, with great self-possession, allowed her to speak to the end, and then drew from her pocket a letter, such as Madame wrote daily to her aunt the Electress of Hanover, in which she spoke in the most outrageous terms of the relations between the king and Mme. de Maintenon. We can imagine that Madame, at the sight, nearly died upon the spot.

When the name of the king was laid aside Mme. de Maintenon began to speak on her own account, and to answer Madame’s reproaches for having changed in her sentiments towards her. After