shook with fright.  And why should not the Queen tremble with unhappy apprehension when even the greatest favorite of all, Madame de Maintenon, found nothing in the life of the Court but bitter striving and heart misery?  In the very midst of her splendor she exclaimed to a friend, “If I could only make clear to you the hideous ennui that devours all of us, the troubles that fill our days!  Do you not see that I am dying of sadness in the midst of a fortune that passes all imagination?  I have had youth and beauty, I have sated myself with pleasure, I have had my hours of intellectual satisfaction, I have enjoyed royal favor, and yet I protest to you, my good friend, that all these conditions leave only a dreadful void.”

Marie Therese took up her abode at Versailles only when the palace was pronounced complete.  She entered her apartments there in 1682, and breathed her last in July of the following year.  The Queen’s bedroom is filled with historic memories.  The walls could whisper many tragic secrets and the halls might assemble by invocation innumerable ghostly figures of fair women that once stood close to the throne, wore royal robes, and nursed breaking hearts.  In the Queen’s bed chamber died Marie Therese and, later, Marie Leczinska, the Queen of Louis XV.  There also the Dauphiness of Bavaria and the Duchess of Burgundy passed away; and, in that chamber, nineteen princes and princesses of the royal blood were born, among whom were King Philip V of Spain and Louis XV of France.  The chamber was occupied first by the pious and devoted Marie Therese; after that by the Bavarian Dauphiness, who died in 1690 at the early age of twenty-nine; then by the Duchess of Burgundy, the mother of Louis XV.  She died in 1712 at the age of twenty-six.  Then Mary Anne Victoire, the Infanta of Spain, occupied the apartment for a brief time; after that, in 1725, came Marie Leczinska, the wife of Louis XV, who lived there for forty-three years, during which she gave birth to ten children.  And, finally, the most appealing figure of all entered that fateful apartment—­she who has been characterized as “the most poetic of women, who combined in herself all majesties and all sorrows, all triumphs and all humiliations, all feminine joys and tears, she whose very name inspires the emotion, tenderness and respect of the world”—­Marie Antoinette.

During the hundred years that followed the entrance of Marie Therese on the scene at Versailles, many extraordinary women came, shone and passed away.  The Hall of Mirrors, had it the power to reflect the past, would afford a gallery of brilliant portraits.  There would be, first, the devout Queen herself, virtuous, kind, considerate, loved by all her people and gently resigned to her fate.  Then would follow a glittering train of proud and brilliant mistresses, some compelling by their beauty and gayety, others by their wit and sense.  Sweet Madame de La Valliere had scarcely passed into obscurity when the haughty