At these words, pronounced in a melancholy and celestial voice, I felt as though my heart were broken, and burst into tears.

“I pity you, Athenais,” she resumed.  “Is, then, what I have been told lightly, and almost in haste, only too certain for you?  How is it you did not expect it?  How could you believe him constant and immutable, after what happened to me?

“To-day, I make no secret to you of it, and I say it with the peaceful indifference which God has generously granted me, after such dolorous tribulations.  I make no secret of it to you, Athenais; a thousand times you plunged the sword and dagger into my heart, when, profiting by my confidence in you, by my sense of entire security, you permitted your own inclination to substitute itself for mine, and a young man seething with desires to be attracted by your charms.  These unlimited sufferings exhausted, I must believe, all the sensibility of my soul.  And when this corrosive flame had completely devoured my grief, a new existence grew up in me; I no longer saw in the father of my children other than a young prince, accustomed to see his dominating will fulfilled in everything.  Knowing how little in this matter he is master of himself, he who knows so well how to be master of himself in everything to do with his numerous inferiors, I deplored the facility he enjoys from his attractions, from his wealth, from his power to dazzle the hearts which he desires to move and subdue.

“Recognise these truths, my dear Marquise,” she added, “and gain, for it is time, a just idea of your position.  After the unhappiness I felt at being loved no longer, I should have quitted the Court that very instant, if I had been permitted to bring up and tend my poor children.  They were too young to abandon!  I stayed still in the midst of you, as the swallow hovers and flits among the smoke of the fire, in order to watch over and save her little ones.  Do not wait till disdain or authority mingles in the matter.  Do not come to the sad necessity of resisting a monarch, and of detesting to the point of scandal that which you have so publicly loved; pity him, but depart.  This kind of intimacy, once broken, cannot be renewed.  However skilfully it may be patched up, the rent always reappears.”

“My good Louise,” I replied to the amiable Carmelite, “your wise counsels touch me, persuade me, and are nothing but the truth.  But in listening to you I feel overwhelmed; and that strength which you knew how to gain, and show to the world, your former companion will never possess.

“I see with astonished eyes the supernatural calm which reigns in your countenance; your health seems to me a prodigy, your beauty was never so ravishing; but this barbarous garb pierces me to the heart.

“The King does not yet hate me; he shows me even a remnant of respect, with which he would colour his indifference.  Permit me to ask from him for you an abbey like that of Fontevrault, where the felicities of sanctuary and of the world are all in the power of my sister.  He will ask nothing better than to take you out, be assured.”