To add to the danger of her position she became seriously ill; sustained heavy money losses; and even her supremacy with the King was gravely imperilled by the arrival at Court of Mazarin’s loveliest niece, Hortense de Mancini, with whom Charles had flirted in the days of his exile, and who now came to England in the full bloom of her peerless beauty to complete her conquest of the amorous Sovereign—­“the last conquest of her conquering eyes,” as Waller wrote in his fulsome greeting of the new divinity of the Whitehall seraglio.

For once Louise’s indomitable courage showed signs of yielding.  The whole armoury of fate seemed arrayed against her at this crisis in her life; even Louis, for whom she had striven so hard, began to distrust her powers and to show indifference to her.  When Forneron paid her a visit at this time he found her in tears.  “She opened her heart to him, in the presence of her two French maids, who stood by with downcast eyes.  Tears rained down her cheeks; and her speech was broken with sobs and sighs.”  Never had this designing beauty been so near the verge of absolute ruin.

It is not necessary perhaps to follow the Duchess through the period of her eclipse; to watch the weak-kneed Charles sink deeper and deeper into the morass of his disloyalty until, in return for a subsidy of L4,000,000, he offered to dissolve parliament and to make England the bond-slave of Louis’s designs on Europe; or to see Louise, the chief instrument of all this ignominy, reach the climax of her disgrace and her peril when mobs besieged Whitehall, and clamoured that the “Jezebel” should be sent to the scaffold.

It is sufficient for our purpose to know that through all this terrible time she steered her way with almost superhuman skill back to the sunshine of success and favour.  Her life-long ambition was crowned when Louis gave her the d’Aubigny lands and, with them, the tabouret which had so long dazzled her eyes and eluded her grasp.  When the sky in England had at last cleared she paid a visit to her native land.  For four ecstatic months the wool merchant’s daughter made a triumphant progress through France, acclaimed and feted as a Queen.  At her castle of d’Aubigny she held a splendid court and dispensed a regal hospitality to the greatest in the land, who had scarcely deigned to notice her in her days as maid-of-honour.  When, according to St Simon, she paid a visit to the Capucines in Paris her approach was heralded by a procession of monks, scattering incense and bearing aloft the holy cross.  “She was received,” we are told, “as if she were a Queen, which quite overwhelmed her, as she was not prepared for such an honour.”  To such a pitch indeed did this popular idolatry reach that she was actually painted as a Madonna to grace the altar of the richest convent in France.

On her return to England from this tour of conquest she found a reception almost equally regal awaiting her.  She was reinstated as chief favourite of the King, all his other mistresses—­even the Queen herself being relegated to the background; and high statesmen and Ambassadors did their homage to her before they sought audience with Charles himself.  She was, in fact, as Louis’s deputy, Vice-Queen of England—­plus roi que le Roi.