food to the frontier of France.  She hoped for aid from the king of Spain; but none came; it got known that the queen had been abetted in everything and beforehand by Philip V. On arriving at St. Jean-de-Luz, she wrote to the king and to Madame de Maintenon:  “Can you possibly conceive, Madame, the situation in which I find myself?  Treated in the face of all Europe, with more contempt by the Queen of Spain than if I were the lowest of wretches?  They want to persuade me that the king acted in concert with a princess who had me treated with such cruelty.  I shall await his orders at St. Jean-de-Luz, where I am in a small house close by the sea.  I see it often stormy and sometimes calm; a picture of courts.  I shall have no difficulty in agreeing with you that it is of no use looking for stability but in God.  Certainly it cannot be found in the human heart, for who was ever more sure than I was of the heart of the King of Spain?”

The king did not reply at all, and Madame de Maintenon but coldly, begging the princess, however, to go to Versailles.  There she passed but a short time, and received notice to leave the kingdom.  With great difficulty she obtained an asylum at Rome, where she lived seven years longer, preserving all her health, strength, mind, and easy grace until she died, in 1722, at more than eighty-four years of age, in obscurity and sadness, notwithstanding her opulence, but avenged of her Spanish foes, Cardinals della Giudice and Alberoni, whom she met again at Rome, disgraced and fugitive like herself.  “I do not know where I may die,” she wrote to Madame de Maintenon, at that time in retirement at St. Cyr.  Both had survived their power; the Princess des Ursins had not long since wanted to secure for herself a dominion; Madame de Maintenon, more far-sighted and more modest, had aspired to no more than repose in the convent which she had founded and endowed.  Discreet in her retirement as well as in her life, she had not left to chance the selection of a place where she might die.

[Illustration:  Death of Madame de Maintenon.——­34]

CHAPTER L——­LOUIS XIV.  AND DEATH. 1711-1715.

“One has no more luck at our age,” Louis XIV. had said to his old friend Marshal Villars, returning from his most disastrous campaign.  It was a bitter reflection upon himself which had put these words into the king’s mouth.  After the most brilliant, the most continually and invariably triumphant of reigns, he began to see Fortune slipping away from him, and the grievous consequences of his errors successively overwhelming the state.  “God is punishing me; I have richly deserved it,” he said to Marshal Villars, who was on the point of setting out for the battle of Denain.  The aged king, dispirited and beaten, could not set down to men his misfortunes and his reverses; the hand of God Himself was raised against his house.  Death was knocking double knocks all round him.