ll
occasions. She liked my husband no better than myself; and my son and my
daughter and her husband were equally objects of her detestation. She
told a lady once that her greatest fault was that of being attached to
me. Neither my son nor I had ever done her any injury. If Monsieur
thought fit to tell his niece, the Duchess of Burgundy, a part of
Maintenon's history, in the vexation he felt at her having estranged the
Princess from him, and not choosing that she should behave affectionately
to her great-uncle, that was not our fault. She was as jealous of the
Dauphine as a lover is of his mistress.

She was in the habit of saying, "I perceive there is a sort of vertigo at
present affecting the whole world." When she perceived that the harvest
had failed, she bought up all the corn she could get in the markets, and
gained by this means an enormous sum of money, while the poor people were
dying of famine. Not having a sufficient number of granaries, a large
quantity of this corn became rotten in the boats loaded with it, and it
was necessary to throw it into the river. The people said this was a
just judgment from Heaven.

My son made me laugh the other day. I asked him how Madame de Maintenon
was.

"Wonderfully well," he replied.

"That is surprising at her age," I said.

"Yes," he rejoined, "but do you not know that God has, by way, of
punishing the devil, doomed him to exist a certain number of years in
that ugly body?"

Montespan was the cause of the King's love for old Maintenon. In the
first place, when she wished to have her near her children, she shut her
ears to the stories which were told of the irregular life which the hussy
had been leading; she made everybody who spoke to the King about her,
praise her; her virtue and piety were cried up until the King was made to
think that all he had heard of her light conduct were lies, and in the
end he most firmly believed it. In the second place, Montespan was a
creature full of caprice, who had no control over herself, was
passionately fond of amusement, was tired whenever she was alone with the
King, whom she loved only, for the purposes of her own interest or
ambition, caring very little for him personally. To occupy him, and to
prevent him from observing her fondness for play and dissipation, she
brought Maintenon. The King was fond of a retired life, and would
willingly have passed his time alone with Montespan; he often reproached
her with not loving him