for she had scarcely established herself in the
palace when her maternal terrors were suddenly awakened by intelligence
of the dangerous illness of her second son, the Duc d'Orleans, upon
which she hastened to St. Germain. The fiat had, however, gone forth,
and two days subsequently the little Prince, upon whose precocious
intellect and sweetness of disposition so many hopes had been built up,
was a corpse in his mother's arms; and within a few hours Madame de
Lorraine and her brother had taken leave of their illustrious relative,
while the Court of the Louvre, so lately giddy with gaiety, was once
more draped in sables.[123]

Devotedly attached to her children, the Queen was for a time
inconsolable; her greatness was embittered by private suffering, and her
authority was endangered by intestine broils; she looked around her, and
scarcely knew upon whom to depend, or upon what to lean. The constant
exactions of the Princes convinced her of the utter hopelessness of
satisfying their venality, and securing their allegiance, save by
sacrifices which gradually tended to diminish her own power, and to
compromise the interests of the Crown, while the people murmured at the
burthens inflicted upon them in order to gratify the greed of
the nobility.

To increase her anxiety, the death of her second son was destined to add
to the number of malcontents by whom the Queen was surrounded, all the
principal officers of his household advancing their claim to be
transferred to that of the infant Duc d'Anjou, who, on the demise of the
Duc d'Orleans, assumed the title of Monsieur, as only brother of the
King. It was, however, impossible to place all these candidates about
the person of the young Prince, and it was ultimately decided that M. de
Breves,[124] a relative of M. de Villeroy, to whom the appointment had
already been promised by Henri IV, should be selected as the preceptor
of Monsieur, to the exclusion of M. de Bethune, who had held the same
post about the Duc d'Orleans, and who consequently demanded to be
transferred to the service of his brother. But the relative of Sully was
little likely to prove a successful candidate; he had owed his previous
appointment to the influence of the powerful kinsman whose counsels
swayed the actions of a great monarch; that monarch was now in his
grave, and that kinsman in honourable exile; and his claim was no longer
admitted. The Marquis de Coeuvres, who had been master of the wardrobe
to