o get any money, or any anything else at
all." Thus she was conducted almost without a mouthful of food to the
frontier of France. She hoped for aid from the king of Spain; but none
came; it got known that the queen had been abetted in everything and
beforehand by Philip V. On arriving at St. Jean-de-Luz, she wrote to the
king and to Madame de Maintenon: "Can you possibly conceive, Madame, the
situation in which I find myself? Treated in the face of all Europe,
with more contempt by the Queen of Spain than if I were the lowest of
wretches? They want to persuade me that the king acted in concert with a
princess who had me treated with such cruelty. I shall await his orders
at St. Jean-de-Luz, where I am in a small house close by the sea. I see
it often stormy and sometimes calm; a picture of courts. I shall have no
difficulty in agreeing with you that it is of no use looking for
stability but in God. Certainly it cannot be found in the human heart,
for who was ever more sure than I was of the heart of the King of Spain?"

The king did not reply at all, and Madame de Maintenon but coldly,
begging the princess, however, to go to Versailles. There she passed but
a short time, and received notice to leave the kingdom. With great
difficulty she obtained an asylum at Rome, where she lived seven years
longer, preserving all her health, strength, mind, and easy grace until
she died, in 1722, at more than eighty-four years of age, in obscurity
and sadness, notwithstanding her opulence, but avenged of her Spanish
foes, Cardinals della Giudice and Alberoni, whom she met again at Rome,
disgraced and fugitive like herself. "I do not know where I may die,"
she wrote to Madame de Maintenon, at that time in retirement at St. Cyr.
Both had survived their power; the Princess des Ursins had not long since
wanted to secure for herself a dominion; Madame de Maintenon, more
far-sighted and more modest, had aspired to no more than repose in the
convent which she had founded and endowed. Discreet in her retirement as
well as in her life, she had not left to chance the selection of a place
where she might die.

[Illustration: Death of Madame de Maintenon.----34]

CHAPTER L----LOUIS XIV. AND DEATH. 1711-1715.

"One has no more luck at our age," Louis XIV. had said to his old friend
Marshal Villars, returning from his most disastrous campaign. It was a
bitter reflection upon himself which had put these words into the king'