she let him know, in no
vague terms, that "it would cost France too many heads if she were to
return to his Court."

Vengeance on her enemies was the only price she would accept for
forgiveness, and this price Louis promised to pay in liberal measure.
One after the other, those who had brought about her humiliation were
sent to disgrace or exile--from the Duc de Chatillon to La Rochefoucauld
and Perusseau. Maurepas, the most virulent of them all, the King
declined to exile, but he consented to a compromise. He should be made
to offer Madame an abject apology, to grovel at her feet, a punishment
with which she was content. And when the great minister presented
himself by her bedside, in fear and trembling, to express his profound
penitence and to beg her to return to Court, all she answered was, "Give
me the King's letters and go!"

The following Saturday she fixed on as the day of her triumphant
return--"but it was death that was to raise her from the bed on which
she had received the King's submission at the hands of his Prime
Minister." Within twenty-four hours she was seized with violent
convulsions and delirium. In her intervals of consciousness she shrieked
aloud that she had been poisoned, and called down curses on her
murderer--Maurepas. For eleven days she passed from one delirious attack
to another, and as many times she was bled. But all the skill of the
Court physicians was powerless to save her, and at five o'clock in the
morning of the 8th December the Duchesse drew her last tortured breath
in the arms of Madame de Mailly, the sister she had so cruelly wronged.

Two days later, de Goncourt tells us, she was buried at Saint Sulpice,
an hour before the customary time for interments, her coffin guarded by
soldiers, to protect it from the fury of the mob.

As for Madame de Mailly, she spent the last years of her troubled life
in the odour of a tardy sanctity--washing the feet of the poor,
ministering to the sick, bringing consolation to those in prison; and
she was laid to rest amongst the poorest in the Cimetiere des Innocents,
wearing the hair-shirt which had been part of her penance during life,
and with a simple cross of wood for all monument.

CHAPTER XXVII

A MISTRESS OF INTRIGUE

"On 11th September," Madame de Motteville says, "we saw arrive from
Italy three nieces of Cardinal Mazarin and a nephew. Two Mancini sisters
and the nephew were the children of the youngest sister of his Eminence