unhappy apprehension when even the greatest favorite of
all, Madame de Maintenon, found nothing in the life of the Court but
bitter striving and heart misery? In the very midst of her splendor
she exclaimed to a friend, "If I could only make clear to you the
hideous _ennui_ that devours all of us, the troubles that fill our
days! Do you not see that I am dying of sadness in the midst of a
fortune that passes all imagination? I have had youth and beauty, I
have sated myself with pleasure, I have had my hours of intellectual
satisfaction, I have enjoyed royal favor, and yet I protest to you, my
good friend, that all these conditions leave only a dreadful void."

Marie Therese took up her abode at Versailles only when the palace was
pronounced complete. She entered her apartments there in 1682, and
breathed her last in July of the following year. The Queen's bedroom
is filled with historic memories. The walls could whisper many tragic
secrets and the halls might assemble by invocation innumerable ghostly
figures of fair women that once stood close to the throne, wore royal
robes, and nursed breaking hearts. In the Queen's bed chamber died
Marie Therese and, later, Marie Leczinska, the Queen of Louis XV.
There also the Dauphiness of Bavaria and the Duchess of Burgundy passed
away; and, in that chamber, nineteen princes and princesses of the
royal blood were born, among whom were King Philip V of Spain and Louis
XV of France. The chamber was occupied first by the pious and devoted
Marie Therese; after that by the Bavarian Dauphiness, who died in 1690
at the early age of twenty-nine; then by the Duchess of Burgundy, the
mother of Louis XV. She died in 1712 at the age of twenty-six. Then
Mary Anne Victoire, the Infanta of Spain, occupied the apartment for a
brief time; after that, in 1725, came Marie Leczinska, the wife of
Louis XV, who lived there for forty-three years, during which she gave
birth to ten children. And, finally, the most appealing figure of all
entered that fateful apartment--she who has been characterized as "the
most poetic of women, who combined in herself all majesties and all
sorrows, all triumphs and all humiliations, all feminine joys and
tears, she whose very name inspires the emotion, tenderness and respect
of the world"--Marie Antoinette.

During the hundred years that followed the entrance of Marie Therese on
the scene at Versailles, many extraordinary women came, shone and
passed away.