es in
the morality of women, and to admit that they were not all equally
virtuous.

"She was little regretted by the Queen," Madame de Motteville tells us,
"as she had frequently forsaken her interests to follow her own
caprices. The minister heard of her death with the feeling one
entertains for one's deceased enemy. Her former lovers looked upon her
with contempt; and those who admired her still, were but little touched
at her loss, because each, jealous of his rival, left tears and grief as
the share of the Duke de Beaufort, who was at that moment the most
beloved."

On that point Madame de Motteville was in error. Which of the two--M. de
Beaufort or M. de Rance--was most beloved it would be difficult to
determine. But this is so far certain, that M. de Rance, the future
founder of La Trappe, was the lover who regretted her the most
sincerely. He had hastened to her sick couch so soon as he heard of her
illness; and he had arrived, not too late, and only to find himself the
spectator of a most horrible sight, as has frequently been related with
much romantic and dramatic detail, but soon enough to pass within her
chamber the last hours left to her of life. "Already balancing and
wrestling between heaven and this world," says Saint Simon, who was in
his confidence, "the sight of that so sudden death achieved in him the
determination of withdrawing from the world which he had for some time
meditated."

Among the different versions of this catastrophe, Laroque asserts that,
after an absence on a long journey, on De Rance's return, he called at
the Hotel Montbazon, and then learned, for the first time, the death of
the Duchess; that he was shown into her room, where, to his horror, the
headless body lay in its coffin. The head had been cut off, either
because the lead coffin was not made long enough or for the purpose of
an anatomical study. Some assert that De Rance took the head, and that
the skull of the woman he loved so well was found in his cell at La
Trappe. History, however, will not accept this romantic incident.

Touching the fate of De Rance's rival--when Louis XIV. returned to Paris
in 1652, the Duke de Beaufort submitted to the royal authority, and took
no further part in the civil war, which the Prince de Conde carried on
for several years longer. Later, the Duke obtained the command of the
royal fleet. In 1664 and 1665, he was at the head of several expeditions
against the African corsairs. In 1666 he