ion prevailed throughout the solitudes of
Castile as well as in those poor _posadas_, bare as an Asiatic
caravanserai. If in the central provinces the populace showed itself
faithful, it was not without extreme suffering and the most cruel
perplexity that the journey could be accomplished by almost
impracticable ways, through detachments of the enemy, launched in
pursuit of the royal retinue. Nothing certainly is more honourable to
the memory of the Princess des Ursins than the letters in which she
relates with charming naturalness the daily accidents of that
adventurous life, which she supported at the age of sixty-five with all
the gaiety of a youthful tourist.[37]

[37] Letters of the Princess to Mad. de Maintenon, from the 24th of
June to 26th October, 1706.--Tom. iii., pp. 305 to 367.

In the midst of these disasters, therefore, Philip V. found a firm
support in the devotion of the people and in the indefatigable zeal of
Madame des Ursins. At Madrid and in all the provinces, except Catalonia,
the allies were received with that repugnance which presages a
disastrous future and belies the most brilliant promises of victory.
Madame des Ursins multiplied herself: speeches, letters, overtures--she
spared nothing to obtain from the people the money indispensable for
carrying on the war. She thus arrested desertion, consolidated in Old
Castile, and even in Andalusia the King's authority; she propagated, in
short (if we may so express it) the feeling of devotedness. She knew how
to surround Philip V. with the austere majesty of royal misfortune
endured with courage and consoled by the watchful love of the nation. At
the same time her cheerful and confident spirit restored to its serenity
the little court of Burgos. She locked within her own bosom her
discouragements and inquietudes: she clung to hope, and that
successfully. She sought and found in her own firm will consolation
justified by events. All her correspondence at this epoch, at times
amiable, witty, affectionate, at others grave, precise, and altogether
politic, full of facts, plans, exact details, worthy of a minister, and
of a great minister too, shows the extraordinary genius of the woman. It
was not she alone, certainly, who saved the dynasty, for it was
necessary to fight and conquer to do that, but she was unquestionably
one of the most vigorous instruments ever made use of by Providence to
work out its own purposes in defence of a nation.

She h