l its promised bliss. Even long before she touched the
pinnacle of her grandeur as governess of the royal children the blackest
calumny began to show itself in prints, caricatures, songs, and pamphlets
of every description.

"A reciprocity of friendship between a Queen and a subject, by those who
never felt the existence of such a feeling as friendship, could only be
considered in a criminal point of view. But by what perversion could
suspicion frown upon the ties between two married women, both living in
the greatest harmony with their respective husbands, especially when both
became mothers and were so devoted to their offspring? This boundless
friendship did glow between this calumniated pair calumniated because the
sacredness and peculiarity of the sentiment which united them was too
pure to be understood by the grovelling minds who made themselves their
sentencers. The friend is the friend's shadow. The real sentiment of
friendship, of which disinterested sympathy is the sign, cannot exist
unless between two of the same sex, because a physical difference
involuntarily modifies the complexion of the intimacy where the sexes are
opposite, even though there be no physical relations. The Queen of
France had love in her eyes and Heaven in her soul. The Duchesse de
Polignac, whose person beamed with every charm, could never have been
condemned, like the Friars of La Trappe, to the mere memento mori.

"When I had made the representations to Her Majesty which duty exacted
from me on perceiving her ungovernable partiality for her new favourite,
that I might not importune her by the awkwardness naturally arising from
my constant exposure to the necessity of witnessing an intimacy she knew
I did not sanction, I obtained permission from my royal mistress to visit
my father-in-law, the Duc de Penthievre, at Rambouillet, his
country-seat.

"Soon after I arrived there, I was taken suddenly ill after dinner with
the most excruciating pains in my stomach. I thought myself dying.
Indeed, I should have been so but for the fortunate and timely discovery
that I was poisoned certainly, not intentionally, by any one belonging to
my dear father's household; but by some execrable hand which had an
interest in my death.

"The affair was hushed up with a vague report that some of the made
dishes had been prepared in a stew-pan long out of use, which the clerk
of the Duke's kitchen had forgotten to get properly tinned.

"This was