fe entirely to Madame de Maintenon. But we know
also that six months after the Queen's death an unwonted light showed at
midnight in the Chapel Royal, where Madame de Maintenon--the child of a
prison cell--was becoming the legal though unacknowledged wife of Louis
XIV. The impassioned, uncalculating de Montespan had given the handsome
Monarch her all without stipulation. Truly the career of Madame de
Maintenon was a triumph of virtue over vice; and yet of all that
heedless, wanton throng, my soul detests only her.

[Illustration: Where the Queen Played]

CHAPTER VIII

MARIE ANTOINETTE

Stereotyped sights are rarely the most engrossing. At the Palace of
Versailles the _petits appartements de la Reine_, those tiny rooms whose
grey old-world furniture might have been in use yesterday, to me hold
more actuality than all the regal salons in whose vast emptiness
footsteps reverberate like echoes from the past.

In the pretty sitting-room the coverings to-day are a reproduction of
the same pale blue satin that draped the furniture in the days when
queens preferred the snug seclusion of those dainty rooms overlooking
the dank inner courtyard to the frigid grandeur of their State chambers.
Therein it was that Marie Leczinska was wont to instruct her young
daughters in the virtues as she had known them in her girlhood's
thread-bare home, not as her residence at the profligate French Court
had taught her to understand them.

[Illustration: Marie Antoinette]

The heavy gilt bolts bearing the interlaced initials M.A. remind us that
these, too, were the favourite rooms of Marie Antoinette, and that in
all probability the cunningly entwined bolts were the handiwork of her
honest spouse, who wrought at his blacksmith forge below while his wife
flirted above. But in truth the _petits appartements_ are instinct with
memories of Marie Antoinette, and it is difficult to think of any save
only her occupying them. The beautiful _coffre_ presented to her with
the layette of the Dauphin still stands on a table in an adjoining
chamber, and the paintings on its white silk casing are scarcely faded
yet, though the decorative ruching of green silk leaves has long ago
fallen into decay.

A step farther is the little white and gold boudoir which still holds
the mirror that gave the haughty Queen her first premonition of the
catastrophe that awaited her. Viewed casually the triple mirror, lining
an alcove wherein stands a couch garl