ht him
face to face with death. Madame de Chateauroux watched his sufferings
with the eyes of despair. "Leaning over the pillow of the dying man,
aghast and trembling, she fights for him with sickness and death, terror
and remorse." With locked door she keeps her jealous watch by his
bedside, allowing none to enter but Richelieu, the doctors, and nurses,
whilst outside are gathered the Princes of the Blood and the great
officers of the Court, clamouring for admittance.

It was a grim environment for the death-bed of a King, this struggle for
supremacy, in which a frail woman defied the powers of France for the
monopoly of his last hours. And chief of all the terrors that assailed
her was the dread of that climax to it all, when her lover would have to
make his last confession, the price of his absolution being, as she well
knew, a final severance from herself.

Over this protracted and unseemly duel, in which blows were exchanged,
entrance was forced, and Princes and ministers crowded indecently around
the King's bed; over the Duchesse's tearful pleadings with the confessor
to spare her the disgrace of dismissal, we must hasten to the crowning
moment when Louis, feeling that he was dying, hastily summoned a
confessor, who, a few moments later, flung open the door of the closet
in which the Duchesse was waiting and weeping, and pronounced the fatal
words, "The King commands you to leave his presence immediately."

Then followed that secret flight to Paris, "amidst a torrent of
maledictions," the Duchesse hiding herself from view as best she could,
and at each town and village where horses were changed, slinking back
and taking refuge in some by-road until she could resume her journey.
Then it was that in her grief and despair she wrote to Richelieu, "Oh,
my God! what a thing it all is! I give you my word, it is all over with
me! One would need to be a poor fool to start it all over again."

But Louis was by no means a dead man. From the day on which he received
absolution from his manifold sins he made such haste to recover that,
within a month, he was well again and eager to fly to the arms of the
woman he had so abruptly abandoned with all other earthly vanities. It
was one thing, however, to dismiss the Duchesse, and quite another to
call her back. For a time she refused point-blank to look again on the
King who had spurned her from fear of hell; and when at last she
consented to receive the penitent at Versailles