le enterprise, ridiculous
and extravagant pretensions were coupled. Finding herself alone at the
right hand of Philip the Fifth, she became puffed up with her exclusive
influence, her new rank and title. She exaggerated her personal
importance. She was possessed with the secret desire of being in Spain,
with a young sovereign, and he too on the eve of marriage, what Madame
de Maintenon was in France, with an aged monarch, and for a while she
attained that object, as flattering to her feminine vanity as to her
ambition.

In this there was only one difference, a difference arising from the
respective characters of these two ladies and of those two kings; which
was that the ascendant of the one, taking the form of friendship the
most discreet, was lasting, whilst the other, exercising a direct,
immediate, and too overt domination, was destined, sooner or later, to
end in tiring out a monarch infinitely less capable than Louis the
Fourteenth, but quite as jealous of sway. The Princess bore, therefore,
rather the semblance of an intriguante, as people remarked, than of a
serious woman, having large views, of will alike firm and prompt, of
enlightened and, in a certain sense, liberal mind, with an entire
abnegation of self--seeking the welfare of the State alone, and the
interests only of the two great countries. Except those whom she had
served, or who had sent her to Spain, few had approved her acts at any
period of her favour. The misfortunes and the abuses that marked her
possession of power, when it had reached its apogee, confirmed them in
their opinion, especially when they saw, in France, the severest censure
launched against her even from high places, whence until then praise had
descended. Others, to whom her previous conduct was less known, judged
her only by what seemed ridiculous or faulty at that period of her life,
and the last impression received was that which they retained, which has
been transmitted to posterity; which was regarded as that most to be
relied upon, and which the almost exclusive perusal of Saint Simon, far
from modifying in any way that impression, only served to confirm it.
That consummate courtier has well said, in his Memoirs, that "her
history deserved to be written," implying the deep interest which would
be derivable from it. The narrative, apart from its interest, is
valuable for the lesson it conveys of the fruitlessness of the devotion
of a most gifted woman's life to the pursuit of