constituted like
Marie Anne de la Tremouille, who had failed to find in her second
marriage any community of taste or intellect.

The disputes between Louis and Innocent XI. proved, perhaps, another
source of disunion between the ducal pair. The Orsini were in some sort
a sacerdotal family, at the same time that they stood at the head of the
Roman aristocracy: it had always furnished Pontiffs and Cardinals to the
Church. It was not, therefore, probable that the Duke di Bracciano, who
was its chief, should hold, in those famous quarrels, an opinion
contrary to that of the Holy Father, more especially if, as it was
rumoured, having no child, he had by an adoption long kept secret,
sought for a son in the family of Innocent XI. himself. The same
induction cannot be drawn from acts which were comprised in the life of
the Duchess di Bracciano. Whether at Rome or at Madrid, the ideas held
by the Court of Versailles upon dogmatic questions, or upon the
relations of the Church with the State, were hers also; and in Italy, in
the halls of the Vatican, she openly evinced her detestation of the
Jesuits, in whom the Ultramontane doctrines were personified. Therein,
in all probability, lay a new stumbling block against which the conjugal
harmony jarred, already shaken as it was by all the dissemblances of
habit, appreciation, and of taste, which difference of nationality
engendered. "_Ce menage ne fut pas concordant_," says Saint-Simon;
"_quoique sans brouillerie ouverte, et les epoux furent quelquefois bien
aises de se separer._"

To escape from these different causes of domestic ennui, the Duchess di
Bracciano varied her sojourn in Italy by long and frequent visits to
France, going thither to present, by clever and well-timed calculation,
the spectacle of a Roman princess whom no one even within the grandiose
precincts of Versailles surpassed either in true French _esprit_ or
steady devotion to the Sovereign. The Duchess formed a close intimacy
with the Marechale de Noailles, to whom she was related; she made the
acquaintance of the minister Torcy, who was capable of appreciating all
the varied resources of her woman's nature and her woman's wit; and she
was presented to Madame de Maintenon, who had become the goddess of the
Court. Her second visit took place shortly after the period of the
Treaty of Ryswick--that is to say, near upon that fatal conjuncture at
which Louis XIV. saw England escape him for ever, supported as she was