cachet and a dungeon in the Bastille, it can only have been
because the King feared the further spread of a scandal injurious to the
sacrosanctity of his royal dignity.

The Marchioness fumed in private and sneered in public. When
Mademoiselle de Montpensier suggested that for his safety's sake she
should control her husband's antics, she expressed her bitterness.

"He and my parrot," she said, "amuse the Court to my shame."

In the end, finding that neither by upbraiding the King nor by beating
his wife could he prevail, Monsieur de Montespan resigned himself after
his own fashion. He went into widower's mourning, dressed his servants
in black, and came ostentatiously to Court in a mourning coach to take
ceremonious leave of his friends. It was an affair that profoundly
irritated the Sun-King, and very nearly made him ridiculous.

Thereafter Montespan abandoned his wife to the King. He withdrew first
to his country seat, and, later, from France, having received more than
a hint that Louis was intending to settle his score with him. By that
time Madame de Montespan was firmly established as maitresse en titre,
and in January of 1669 she gave birth to the Duke of Maine, the first
of the seven children she was to bear the King. Parliament was to
legitimize them all, declaring them royal children of France, and the
country was to provide titles, dignities, and royal rent-rolls for them
and their heirs forever. Do you wonder that there was a revolution
a century later, and that the people, grown weary of the parasitic
anachronism of royalty, should have risen to throw off the intolerable
burden it imposed upon them?

The splendour of Madame de Montespan in those days was something the
like of which had never been seen at the Court of France. On her estate
of Clagny, near Versailles, stood now a magnificent chateau. Louis had
begun by building a country villa, which satisfied her not at all.

"That," she told him, "might do very well for an opera-girl"; whereupon
the infatuated monarch had no alternative but to command its demolition,
and call in the famous architect, Mansard, to erect in its place an
ultraroyal residence.

At Versailles itself, whilst the long-suffering Queen had to be content
with ten rooms on the second floor, Madame de Montespan was installed
in twice that number on the first; and whilst a simple page sufficed
to carry the Queen's train at Court, nothing less than the wife of a
marshal of France