The King, whose glance, though very sweet, is very searching, said to me that evening, “Something troubles you; what is it?” He felt my pulse, and perceived my great agitation.  I showed him the letter just transcribed, and his Majesty changed colour.

“It is a matter requiring caution and tact,” added the prince after brief meditation.  “At any rate we can prevent his showing you any disrespect.  Give up the Marquis d’Antin to him,” continued the King, after another pause.  “He is useless, perhaps an inconvenience, to you; and if deprived of his child he might be driven to commit some desperate act.”

“I would rather die!” I exclaimed, bursting into tears.

The King affectionately took hold of both my hands, and gently said: 

“Very well, then, keep him yourself, and don’t give him up.”

As God is my witness, M. de Montespan had already neglected me for some time before he left for the Pyrenees; and to me this sudden access of fervour seemed singularly strange.  But I am not easily hoodwinked; I understood him far better and far quicker than he expected.  The Marquis is one of those vulgar-minded men who do not look upon a woman as a friend, a companion, a frank, free associate, but as a piece of property or of furniture, useful to his house, and which he has procured for that purpose only.

I am told that in England a man is the absolute proprietor of his wife, and that if he took her to the public market with a cord round her neck and exhibited her for sale, such sale is perfectly valid in the eyes of the law.  Laws such as these inspire horror.  Yet they should hardly surprise one among a semibarbarous nation, which does nothing like other peoples, and which deems itself authorised to place the censer in the hands of its monarch, and its monarch in the hands of the headsman.

M. de Montespan came to Paris and instituted proceedings against me before the Chatelet authorities.  To the King he sent a letter full of provocations and insults.  To the Pope he sent a formal complaint, accompanied by a most carefully prepared list of opinions which no lawyer was willing to sign.  For three whole months he tormented the Pope, in order to induce him to annul our marriage.  Of a truth, our Sovereign Pontiff could have done nothing better, but in Rome justice and religion always rank second to politics.  The cardinals feared to offend a great prince, and so they suffered me to remain the wife of my husband.  When he saw that on every side his voice was lost in the desert, and that the King, being calmer and more prudent than he, did not deign to pick up the glove, his folly reached its utmost limit.  He went into the deepest mourning ever seen.  He draped his horses and carriages with black.  He gave orders for a funeral service to be held in his parish, which the whole town and its suburbs were invited to attend.  He declared, verbally and in writing, that he no longer possessed a wife; that Madame de Montespan had died of an attack of coquetry and ambition; and he talked of marrying again when the year of mourning and of widowhood should be over.