Henceforth Madame de Montespan “interfered with” the king.  He gave the new dauphiness Madame de Maintenon as her mistress of the robes.  “I am told,” writes Madame de Sevigne, “that the king’s conversations do nothing but increase and improve, that they last from six to ten o’clock, that the daughter-in-law goes occasionally to pay them a shortish visit, that they are found each in a big chair, and that, when the visit is over, the talk is resumed.  The lady is no longer accosted without awe and respect, and the ministers pay her the court which the rest do.  No friend was ever so careful and attentive as the king is to her; she makes him acquainted with a perfectly new line of country—­I mean the intercourse of friendship and conversation, without chicanery and without constraint; he appears to be charmed with it.”

Discreet and adroit as she was, and artificial without being false, Madame de Maintenon gloried in bringing back the king and the court to the ways of goodness.  “There is nothing so able as irreproachable conduct,” she used to say.  The king often went to see the queen; the latter heaped attentions upon Madame de Maintenon.  “The king never treated me more affectionately than he has since she had his ear,” the poor princess would say.  The dauphiness had just had a son.  The joy at court was excessive.  “The king let anybody who pleased embrace him,” says the Abbe de Croisy; “he gave everybody his hand to kiss.  Spinola, in the warmth of his zeal, bit his finger; the king began to exclaim.  ‘Sir,’ interrupted the other, ’I ask your Majesty’s pardon; but, if I hadn’t bitten you, you would not have noticed me.’  The lower orders seemed beside themselves, they made bonfires of everything.  The porters and the Swiss burned the poles of the chairs, and even the floorings and wainscots intended for the great gallery.  Bontemps, in wrath, ran and told the king, who burst out laughing and said, ’Let them be; we will have other floorings.’”

The least clear-sighted were beginning to discern the modest beams of a rising sun.  Madame de Montespan, who had a taste for intellectual things, had not long since recommended Racine and Boileau to the king to write a history of his reign.  They had been appointed historiographers.  “When they had done some interesting piece,” says Louis Racine in his Memoires, “they used to go and read it to the king at Madame de Montespan’s.  Madame de Maintenon was generally present at the reading.  She, according to Boileau’s account, liked my father better than him, and Madame de Montespan, on the contrary, liked Boileau better than my father, but they always paid their court jointly, without any jealousy between them.  When Madame de Montespan would let fall some rather tart expressions, my father and Boileau, though by no means sharp-sighted, observed that the king, without answering her, looked with a smile at Madame de Maintenon, who was seated opposite to him on a stool, and who finally disappeared all