ver the poor Abbe d'Estrees, so teased and hampered him, that
he consented to the hitherto unheard-of arrangement, that the Ambassador
of France should not write to the King without first concerting his
letter with her, and afterwards show her its contents before he
despatched it. But such restraint as this became, in a short time, so
fettering, that the Abbe determined to break away from it. He wrote a
letter to the King without showing it to Madame des Ursins. She soon had
scent of what he had done; seized the letter as it passed through the
post, opened it, and, as she expected, found its contents were not of a
kind to give her much satisfaction. In fact, in her emotion of anger and
indignation she made a false step in her state-craft of a nature one can
hardly imagine a person so astute as the Princess making. This blunder
led to a great _imbroglio_.

[26] Saint Simon.

The question has been raised--Did Madame des Ursins always use the
intimate and uncontrolled influence she had obtained over the young
Queen of fourteen in a purely devoted and disinterested way? It would be
difficult, certainly, to answer in the affirmative. Louville, her rival
and enemy, a man of talent and ardour, but passionate, represents her as
the wickedest woman on earth, to be got rid of at the earliest possible
moment and at any cost, "sordid and thievish to a marvellous degree." He
raises the same accusation against Orry, a clever man whom Louis XIV.
had sent to Spain to put some order into her finances. These accusations
seem to have been unjustifiable. The Marshal Duke of Berwick, who kept
himself aloof from all these odious bickerings, does more justice to
Orry, and everything leads the impartial student to think that Madame
des Ursins on that score comes out of the scrutiny with still cleaner
hands. "_Je suis gueuse, il est vrai_," she writes to Madame de Noailles
on first going to Spain, "_mais je suis encore plus fiere_." Detailing
to Madame de Maintenon somewhat later the indignities they both had to
put up with from accusations of a like nature, she speaks of them in a
tone of lofty irony and sovereign contempt which appears to exclude
anything like falsehood.

But what seems more certain--if the truth must be told--is, although a
little singular at first sight, that at the age of sixty and upwards,
Madame des Ursins still had lovers. "She is hair-brained in her
conduct,"[27] wrote Louville to the Duke and Duchess de Beauvill