s so, since you know already what I seek, tell me can you
procure it me?" she asked in a fever of excitement. "I will pay well."

La Voisin smiled darkly.

"Obdurate, indeed, is the case that will not yield to such medicine as
mine," she said. "Let me consider first what must be done. In a few days
I shall bring you word. But have you courage for a great ordeal?"

"For any ordeal that will give me what I want."

"In a few days, then, you shall hear from me," said the witch, and so
dismissed the great lady.

Leaving a heavy purse behind her, as Vanens had instructed her, the
Marchioness departed with her escort. And there, with that initiation,
as far as we can ascertain, ended Louis de Vanens's connection with the
affair.

At Clagny Madame de Montespan waited for three days in a fever of
impatience for the coming of the witch. But when at last La Voisin
presented herself, the proposal that she had to make was one before
which the Marchioness recoiled in horror and some indignation.

The magic that La Voisin suggested involved a coadjutor, the Abbe
Guibourg, and the black mass to be celebrated by him. Madame de
Montespan had heard something of these dread sacrificial rites to Satan;
sufficient to fill her with loathing and disgust of the whitefaced,
beady-eyed woman who dared to insult her by the proposal. She fumed and
raged a while, and even went near to striking La Voisin, who looked
on with inscrutable face and stony, almost contemptuous, indifference.
Before that impenetrable, almost uncanny, calm, Madame de Montespan's
fury at last abated. Then the urgency of her need becoming paramount,
she desired more clearly to be told what would be expected of her.
What the witch told her was more appalling than anything she could have
imagined. But La Voisin argued:

"Can anything be accomplished without cost? Can anything be gained in
this life without payment of some kind?"

"But the price of this is monstrous!" Madame de Montespan protested.

"Measure it by the worldly advantages to be gained. They are not small,
madame. To enjoy boundless wealth, boundless power, and boundless
honour, to be more than queen--is not all this worth some sacrifice?"

To Madame de Montespan it must have been worth any sacrifice in this
world or the next, since in the end she conquered her disgust, and
agreed to lend herself to this horror.

Three masses, she was told, would be necessary to ensure success, and
it was determined th