she should
discontinue her wanton, adulterous life. She appealed to the king, and
he referred the decision of the matter to Bossuet, who decided that
it was an imperative duty to deny absolution to public sinners of
notorious lives who refused to abandon them. This was immediately
before her legal separation from her husband.

Influenced by the preaching of men like Bourdaloue and Bossuet,
the king resolved to abandon his powerful mistress; in 1686 she was
finally separated from Louis XIV., but did not leave Versailles until
1691, when, becoming reconciled to her fate, she decided to retire
to a convent. Bossuet became her spiritual adviser, and described her
habits in the following letter to the king:

"I find Mme. de Montespan sufficiently tranquil. She occupies herself
greatly in good works. I see her much affected by the verities I
propose to her, which are the same I uttered to your majesty. To
her--as to you--I have offered the words by which God commands us
to yield our whole hearts to him; they have caused her to shed many
tears. May God establish these verities in the depths of the hearts of
both of you, in order that so many tears, so much suffering, so many
efforts as you have made to subdue yourselves, may not be in vain."

The king did not wholly abandon his mistress; from a material point of
view, she was more powerful than ever, for Louis XIV. gave orders
to his minister, Colbert, to do for Mme. de Montespan whatever she
wished, and her wishes caused a heavy drain upon the treasury. The
king continued to pay court to other favorites, such as the Princesse
de Soubese and Mlle. de Fontanges; the latter was his third mistress,
but her career was of short duration, as one of the last acts of Mme.
de Montespan was, it is said, the poisoning of Mlle. de Fontanges;
this, however, is not generally accepted as true, although the
Princesse Palatine wrote the following which throws suspicion upon
the former favorite: "Mme. de Montespan was a fiend incarnate, but the
Fontanges was good and simple. The latter is dead--because, they say,
the former put poison in her milk. I do not know whether or not this
is true, but what I do know well is that two of the Fontanges's
people died, saying publicly that they had been poisoned." With the
increasing influence of Mme. de Maintenon, the king completely forgot
his former mistress.

Mme. de Montespan was possibly the most arrogant and despotic of all
French mistresses an