moreover, of crafty brain, who had already acquired an ascendancy over
the King's mind.

With Madame de Tencin, a woman as scheming and with as evil a reputation
as himself, for chief ally, the Due determined to find another mistress
who should finally oust Madame de Mailly from Louis' favour; and her he
found in a woman, devoted to himself and his interests, and of such
surpassing loveliness that, when the King first saw her at Petit Bourg,
he exclaimed, "Heavens! how beautiful she is!"

Such was the involuntary tribute Louis paid at first sight to the charms
of Madame de la Tournelle, who was now fated to take the place of her
dead sister, Madame de Vintimille, just as the Comtesse had supplanted
another sister, Madame de Mailly.

CHAPTER XXVI

THE RIVAL SISTERS--_continued_

Louis XV.'s involuntary exclamation when he first set eyes on the
loveliness of Madame de la Tournelle, "Heavens! how beautiful she is!"
becomes intelligible when we look on Nattier's picture of this fairest
of the de Nesle sisters in his "Allegory of the Daybreak," and read the
contemporary descriptions of her charms.

"She ravished the eye," we are told, "with her skin of dazzling
whiteness, her elegant carriage, her free gestures, the enchanting
glance of her big blue eyes--a gaze of which the cunning was veiled by
sentiment--by the smile of a child, moist lips, a bosom surging,
heaving, ever agitated by the flux and reflux of life, by a physiognomy
at once passionate and mutinous." And to these seductions were added a
sunny temperament, an infectious gaiety of spirit, and a playful wit
which made her infinitely attractive to men much less susceptible that
the amorous Louis.

It is little wonder then that in the reaction which followed his stormy
grief for his dead love, the Comtesse de Vintimille, he should turn from
the lachrymose companionship of Madame de Mailly to bask in the
sunshine of this third of the beautiful sisters, Madame de la Tournelle,
and that the wish to possess her should fire his blood. But Madame de la
Tournelle was not to prove such an easy conquest as her two sisters, who
had come almost unasked to his arms.

At the time when she came thus dramatically into his life she was living
with Madame de Mazarin, a strong-minded woman who had no cause to love
Louis, who had thwarted and opposed him more than once, and who was
determined at any cost to keep her protegee and pet out of his clutches.
And his desi