Marie Louise, having been married by proxy, in the great Chapel of Saint Germain, where the Cardinal de Bouillon blessed the ring in his quality of Grand Almoner of France, left for that Spain which her young heart distrusted.

Her beauty and charms rendered her precious to the monarch, utterly melancholy and devout as he was.  He did not delay subjecting her to the wretched, petty, tiresome, and absurd etiquette of that Gothic Court.  Mademoiselle submitted to all these nothings, seeing she had been able to submit to separation from France.  She condemned herself to the most fastidious observances and the most sore privations, which did not much ameliorate her lot.

A young Castilian lord, almost mad himself, thought fit to find this Queen pretty, and publicly testify his love for her.  The jealousy of the religious King flared up like a funeral torch.  He conceived a hatred of his wife, reserved and innocent though she was.  She died cruelly by poison.  And Monseigneur le Dauphin probably cried, after his manner: 

“What a great pity!  She won’t send me the touru!”

CHAPTER XIV.

The Dauphine of Bavaria.—­The Confessor with Spurs.—­Madame de Maintenon Disputes with Bossuet.—­He Opposes to Her Past Ages and History.—­The Military Absolution.

Eight months after the wedding of Marie Louise, we witnessed the arrival of Anne Marie Christine, Princess of Bavaria, daughter of the Elector Ferdinand.  The King and Monseigneur went to receive her at Vitry-le-Francais, and then escorted her to Chalons, where the Queen was awaiting her.

The Cardinal de Bouillon celebrated the marriage in the cathedral church of this third-class town.  The festivities and jubilations there lasted a week.

The King had been very willing to charge me with the arrangement of the baskets of presents destined for the Dauphine; I acquitted myself of this commission with French taste and a sentiment of what was proper.  When the Queen saw all these magnificent gifts placed and spread out in a gallery, she cried out, and said: 

“Things were not done so nobly for me; and yet, I can say without vanity, I was of a better house than she.”

This remark paints the Queen, Maria Theresa, better than anything which could be said.  Can one wonder, after that, that she should have brought into the world an hereditary prince who so keenly loves ‘touru’, and asks for it!

Madame de Maintenon and M. Bossuet had gone to receive the Princess of Schelestadt.  When she was on her husband’s territory, and it was necessary, to confess her for the sacrament of matrimony, she was strangely embarrassed.  They had not remembered to bring a chaplain of her own nation for her; and she could not confess except in the German tongue.

Madame de Maintenon, who is skilled in all matters of religion, said to the prelate:  “I really think, monsieur, that, having educated Monsieur le Dauphin, you ought to know a little German,—­you who have composed the treatise on universal history.”