oyal sunshine. Madame de la Valliere,
perceiving herself to be gradually superseded by Madame de Montespan,
fled to a convent three times, and was finally permitted to remain
there; M. de Montespan, having vainly attempted to remove his wife from
court, was sent to the Bastile, and on his release was ordered to his
estate. There he put on mourning, as though she were dead, which the
king considered a great affront. His wife graciously made use of her
influence at court to procure a renewal of the pension of the widow
Scarron, only to see her ultimately appointed guardian of the king's
children and succeed her in her position, as Madame de Maintenon.

"Violating all laws, civil and religious," says Duruy, "the king placed
on a level with the princes of the blood the princes _legitimized_. He
forced the court to respect the one as equal to the other; and the
public morality received a blow from which it was very slow to recover."
These lessons were not lost, and the annals of the nobility are full of
scandalous examples. The ducs d'Orleans and Vendome were addicted to
infamous debauchery; the Duc d'Antin was caught, _flagrante delicto_, in
theft; drunkenness and gambling were prevalent at court, the Grand
Prieur de Vendome boasted that he had not gone to bed sober one night
in forty years. Pascal, discussing the privileges of the nobles and the
kings, said to them boldly: "You are kings only of concupiscence." This
great court, the most brilliant in Europe, "sweated hypocrisy," said
Saint-Simon. It may be remarked, that, in addition to the very frequent
disfigurement by small-pox, from which even the king was not entirely
free, there was a remarkable prevalence of deformity among the families
of the aristocracy. "There was scarcely one of which some member, male
or female, had not a curved spine, a distorted limb, or other
malformation; owing, most likely, to the common practice of closely
swathing the limbs of infants, and of confiding young children to the
charge of careless and ignorant nurses, for the first three or four
years of their lives."

Two of the mysteries of this reign which have long furnished themes for
discussion have lately been solved by the ingenuity of modern research.
The "Man in the Iron Mask," guarded in the Bastile "for forty-two
years," treated with the utmost consideration and buried under a false
name, it now appears was confined there only five years, from September,
1698, to his death in Nov