could be administered. And as the confessor, charged with
the dead woman's last penitent message to her sister, entered Madame de
Mailly's _salon_, he dropped dead."

Here, indeed, was tragedy in its most sudden and terrible form! The King
was stunned, incredulous. He refused to believe that the woman he had so
lately clasped in his arms, so warm, so full of life, was dead. And when
at last the truth broke on him with crushing force, he was as a man
distraught. "He shut himself up in his room, and listened half-dead to a
Mass from his bed." He would not allow any but the priest to come near
him; he repulsed all efforts at consolation.

And whilst Louis was thus alone with his demented grief, "thrust away in
a stable of the palace, lay the body of the dead woman, which had been
kept for a cast to be taken; that distorted countenance, that mouth
which had breathed out its soul in a convulsion, so that the efforts of
two men were required to close it for moulding, the already decomposing
remains of Madame de Vintimille served as a plaything and a
laughing-stock to the children and lackeys."

When the storm of his grief at last began to abate, the King retired to
his remote country-seat of Saint Leger, carrying his broken heart with
him--and also Madame de Mailly, as sharer of his sorrow; for it was to
the woman whom he had so lightly discarded that he first turned for
solace. At Saint Leger he passed his days in reading and re-reading the
two thousand letters the dead Comtesse had written to him, sprinkling
their perfumed pages with his tears. And when he was not thus burying
himself in the past, he was a prey to the terrors that had obsessed his
childhood--the fear of death and of hell.

At supper--the only meal which he shared with others, he refused to
touch meat, "in order that he might not commit sin on every side"; if a
light word was spoken he would rebuke the speaker by talk of death and
judgment; and if his eyes met those of Madame de Mailly, he burst into
tears and was led sobbing from the room.

The communion of grief gradually awoke in him his old affection for
Madame de Mailly; and for a time it seemed not unlikely that she might
regain her lost supremacy. But the discarded mistress had many enemies
at Court, who were by no means willing to see her re-established in
favour--the chief of them, the Duc de Richelieu, the handsomest man and
the "hero" of more scandalous amours than any other in France--a man,