The Sun King built Versailles and established his Court there.  It was the women that made the life of Versailles—­and gave their lives to it.  The Court was a dazzling spider’s web, and many a beautiful favorite became fatally entangled in its glittering meshes.

Louis XIV, when twenty-two years of age, married Marie Therese, daughter of Philip IV of Spain.  If he had been a simple, respectable young man of France, he might then have settled down and finished the story by “living happily ever after.”  But he was not.  He was the King of France; so he pursued the royal road that his antecedents had blazed before him; and the way was made easy and pleasant for him.  In treading the “primrose path of dalliance” he allowed no grass to grow under his feet.

Louis made Marie Therese his Queen and consort in 1660, and it was only a year later when his fancy was caught by the dainty and attractive little Francoise Louise La Valliere.  She was scarcely more than seventeen years of age when she became the favorite of the King.  She was a delicate little creature, slightly lame, but most feminine in her appeal, and she caught the King by her very girlishness, as she played like a child with him in the parks of the palace.  She was a simple maid of honor to Queen Marie Therese when she first attracted the notice of the King.  A few years afterward she was created a duchess and, as such, retained the royal favor for a time.  Then remorse seized upon La Valliere; she took the veil, and, as Sister Louise of Mercy, entered a convent, and gave her life in religious solitude to expiate the grief that she had caused the good Queen.  The atonement was only just, for Louise de Valliere had made Marie Therese suffer bitterly the tortures of jealousy and offended conjugal affection.  The Queen was not a woman of unusual intelligence, but she was sensible, tactful, and had a certain native dignity that compelled respect.  She was, moreover, devoutly religious and devotedly attached to her children.  She shared her royal Husband’s conviction as to the divine right of kings, and what he did she considered could not be wrong.  Of all the women that were associated with Louis, no one more truly admired him nor was more ardently devoted to him than his Queen.  When they were first married, Louis treated Marie Therese with kindly consideration.  He shed tears of sympathy and anguish while she suffered in giving birth to her first child.  During the following dozen years, Marie Therese bore six sons and daughters, but all were lost except the Dauphin, and he died before ascending the throne.  These bereavements sank deep into her heart and left a wound there that never healed.  Added to this was the spectacle that she was called on repeatedly to witness of the King’s infidelities with a succession of favorites.  She was compelled to take these women into her household and make companions of them, knowing the while that they were really her rivals