and persecutors.  She was often heard to cry out concerning one or other of the favorites, “That woman will be the death of me.”  La Valliere she could afford to forgive, for the first mistress paid for the brief royal favor that she enjoyed by thirty-six years of rigid and austere penitence.  Other favorites, however, pursued a path of pride, lowering their heads only under the “bludgeonings of Fate.”  Yet most of them, while Marie Therese lived, respected and honored her and felt a certain sense of shame in her presence.  The brilliant and beautiful Madame de Montespan said, some time before her scandalous relations with the King had fairly begun, “God preserve me from being the King’s mistress.  If I were so I should feel ashamed to face the Queen.”  And yet Madame de Montespan, within a short time, assumed the role of favorite, and carried it out with great pride and arrogant assurance.  The conviction is forced upon us, however, by the evidence of those that witnessed her ascendancy, that Montespan frequently felt the stings of self-reproach when she met the Queen, and that her haughty bearing concealed a genuine sense of shame.  In the midst of luxury, power and brilliant success she seemed at times a small and mean character in the presence of the pious Marie Therese.  As Louis’ infidelities increased in number, his sense of guilt toward his consort was stamped deeper on his consciousness.  He endeavored to make amends by paying her marked respect and treating her at times with distinguished tenderness and consideration.  But Versailles was the high seat of elaborate and elegant insincerity, and no one was deceived by the formal courtesies paid by the Sun King to his unhappy wife.  The deference that he displayed toward her in public appeared to the eyes of the world to be simply a cloak for essential neglect.  And she, poor creature, with all the prestige of the Queen of France, was but a pitiful thing in the presence of the King.  She tried to do her best to please him.  The thought of offense to the Monarch beset her with fear.  The Princess Palatine wrote of her once:  “When the King came to her she was so gay that people remarked it.  She would laugh and twinkle and rub her little hands.  She had such a love for the King that she tried to catch in his eyes every hint of the things that would give him pleasure.  If he ever looked at her kindly, that day was bright.”  Madame De Caylus tells us that the Queen had such a dread of her royal husband and such an inborn timidity that she hardly dared speak to him.  Madame de Maintenon relates that the King, having once sent for the Queen, asked Madame to accompany Her Majesty so that she might not have to appear alone in the presence of her royal husband, and that when Madame de Maintenon conducted the Queen to the door of the King’s room, and there took the liberty of pushing her ahead so as to force her to enter, she observed that Marie Therese fell into such a great tremble that her very hands