y in the festival of life, a girl of eighteen who had
been made for caresses and who died of them, the only human being save
Louis XIV that ever loved the fourteenth Louis. Other women adulated the
king. It was the man that Louise de la Valliere adored. To other women his
sceptre was a fan. To her it was a regret. Could he have been some mere
lieutenant of the guards she would have preferred it inexpressibly. The
title of duchess which he gave her was a humiliation which she hid beneath
the name of Soeur Louise de la Misericorde. For her youth which was a
poem of love had the cloister for climax. That love, a pastime to him, was
death to her. At its inception she fled from it, from the sun, from the
Sun-King, and flinging at him a passionate farewell, flung herself as
passionately into a convent.

Louis stormed it. If necessary he would have burned it. He strode in
booted and spurred as already he had stalked into Parliament where he
shouted:--"L'Etat c'est moi." Mlle. de la Valliere c'etait lui aussi. The
girl, then prostrate before a crucifix, was clinging to the feet of a
Christ. But her god was the king. He knew it. When he appeared so did she.
For a moment, Louis, he to whom France knelt, knelt to her. For a moment
the monarch had vanished. A lover was there. From a chapel came an odor of
incense. Beyond, a knell was being tolled. For background were the scared
white faces of nuns, alarmed at this irruption of human passion in a
retreat where hearts were stirred but by the divine. A moment only. Louis,
with his prey, had gone.

Thereafter for a few brief years, this girl who, had she wished could have
ruled the world, wanted, not pomp, not power, not parade, love, merely
love, nothing else. It was very ambitious of her. Yet, precisely as
through fear of love she had flung herself into a cloister, at the loss of
it she returned there, hiding herself so effectually in prayer that the
king himself could hardly have found her--had he tried. He omitted to.
Louis then was occupied with the Marquise de Montespan. Of trying he never
thought. On the contrary. Mme. de Montespan was very fetching.

A year later, in the Church of the Carmelites, in the presence of the
patient queen, of the impatient marquise, of the restless court--complete,
save for Louis who was hunting--Mlle. de la Valliere, always semi-seraphic
but then wholly soul, saw the severe Bossuet slowly ascend the pulpit, saw
him bow there to the queen, make the