must perform the same office for the favourite. She
kept royal state as few queens have ever kept it. She was assigned a
troop of royal bodyguards for escort, and when she travelled there was a
never-ending train to follow her six-horse coach, and officers of State
came to receive her with royal honours wherever she passed.

In her immeasurable pride she became a tyrant, even over the King
himself.

"Thunderous and triumphant," Madame de Sevigne describes her in those
days when the Sun-King was her utter and almost timid slave.

But constancy is not a Jovian virtue. Jupiter grew restless, and
then, shaking off all restraint, plunged into inconstancy of the most
scandalous and flagrant kind. It is doubtful if the history of royal
amours, with all its fecundity, can furnish a parallel. Within a few
months, Madame de Soubise, Mademoiselle de Rochefort-Theobon, Madame
de Louvigny, Madame de Ludres, and some lesser ones passed in rapid
succession through the furnace of the Sun-King's affection--which is to
say, through the royal bed--and at last the Court was amazed to see the
Widow Scarron, who had been appointed governess to Madame de Montespan's
royal children, empanoplied in a dignity and ceremony that left no doubt
on the score of her true position at Court.

And so, after seven years of absolute sway in which homage had been
paid her almost in awe by noble and simple alike, Madame de Montespan,
neglected now by Louis, moved amid reflections of that neglect, with
arrogantly smiling lips and desperate rage in her heart. She sneered
openly at the royal lack of taste, allowed her barbed wit to make
offensive sport with the ladies who supplanted her; yet, ravaged
by jealousy, she feared for herself the fate which through her had
overtaken La Valliere.

That fear was with her now as she sat in the window embrasure, hell in
her heart and a reflection of it in her eyes, as, fallen almost to the
rank of a spectator in that comedy wherein she was accustomed to the
leading part, she watched the shifting, chattering, glittering crowd.
And as she watched, her line of vision was crossed to her undoing by the
slender, wellknit figure of de Vanens, who, dressed from head to foot in
black, detached sharply from that dazzling throng. His face was pale and
saturnine, his eyes dark, very level, and singularly piercing. Thus
his appearance served to underline the peculiar fascination which he
exerted, the rather sinister appeal which