entleman to the blond Queen, or to
give him a command himself.

The Marquis de Lauzun, having learnt the steps taken by the Queen of
Portugal, whom he had never been able to endure, grew violently angry,
and said in twenty houses that he had not come out of one prison to throw
himself into another.

These were all the thanks the Queen got for her efforts; and, like
Mademoiselle de Montpensier, she detested, with all her soul, the man she
had loved with all her heart.

The Marquis de Lauzun was one of the handsomest men in the world; but his
character spoiled everything.

CHAPTER XXV.

The Nephews, the Nieces, the Cousins and the Brother of Madame de
Maintenon.--The King's Debut.--The Marshal's Silver Staff.

The family of Madame de Maintenon had not only neglected but despised her
when she was poor and living on her pension of two thousand francs. Since
my protection and favour had brought her into contact with the sun that
gives life to all things, and this radiant star had shed on-her his own
proper rays and light, all her relatives in the direct, oblique, and
collateral line had remembered her, and one saw no one but them in her
antechambers, in her chamber, and at Court.

Some of them were not examples of deportment and good breeding; they were
gentlemen who had spent all their lives in little castles in Angoumois
and Poitou, a kind of noble ploughmen, who had only their silver swords
to distinguish them from their vine-growers and herds. Others, to be
just, honoured the new position of the Marquise; and amongst those I must
place first the Marquis de Langallerie and the two sons of the Marquis de
Villette, his cousin, german. The Abbe d'Aubigne, whom she had
discovered obscurely hidden among the priests of Saint Sulpice, she had
herself presented to the King, who had discovered in him the air of an
apostle, and then to Pere de la Chaise, who had hastened to make him
Archbishop of Rouen, reserving for him 'in petto' the cardinal's hat, if
the favour of the lady in waiting was maintained.

Among her lady relatives who had come from the provinces at the rumour of
this favour, the Marquise distinguished and exhibited with satisfaction
the three Mademoiselles de Sainte Hermine, the daughters of a Villette,
if I am not mistaken, and pretty and graceful all three of them. She had
also brought to her Court, and more particularly attached to her person,
a very pretty child, only daughter of the Marquis de V