later became such an
adept, on Mazarin's lovely niece, Marie Mancini. Tall, with a well-knit,
supple figure, with dark, beautiful eyes illuminating a singularly
handsome face, with a bearing of rare grace and distinction, this son of
Anne of Austria was a lover whom few women could resist.

Such conquests came to him with fatal ease, and for thirty years at
least, until satiety killed passion, there was no lack of beautiful
women to minister to his pleasure and to console him for the lack of
charms in the Spanish wife whom Mazarin thrust into his reluctant arms
when he was little more than a boy, and when his heart was in Marie
Mancini's keeping.

Among all the fair and frail women who succeeded one another in his
affection three stand out from the rest with a prominence which his
special favour assigned to each in turn. For ten early years it was
Louise de la Baume-Leblanc (better known to fame as the Duchesse de
Lavalliere) who reigned as his uncrowned Queen, and who gave her life to
his pleasure and to the care of the children she bore to him. But such
constancy could not last for ever in a man so constitutionally
inconstant as Louis. When the Marquise de Montespan, in all her radiant
and sensuous loveliness, came on the scene, she drew the King to her
arms as a flame lures the moth. Her voluptuous charms, her abounding
vitality and witty tongue, made the more refined beauty and the
gentleness of the Duchesse flavourless in comparison; and Louise,
realising that her sun had set, retired to spend the rest of her life in
the prayers and piety of a convent, leaving her brilliant rival in
undisputed possession of the field.

For many years Madame de Montespan, the most consummate courtesan who
ever enslaved a King, queened it over Louis in her magnificent
apartments at Versailles and in the Tuileries. He was never weary of
showering rich gifts and favours on her; and, in return, she became the
mother of his children and ministered to his every whim, little dreaming
of the day when she in turn was to be dethroned by an insignificant
widow whom she regarded as the creature of her bounty, and who so often
awaited her pleasure in her ante-room.

* * * * *

When Francoise d'Aubigne was cradled, one November day in the year 1635,
within the walls of a fortress-prison in Poitou, the prospect of a
Queendom seemed as remote as a palace in the moon. She had good blood in
her veins, it is true.