“Speak to him of me,” answered Louise; “I do not oppose that; but leave me until the end the role of obedience and humility that his fault and mine impose on me.  Why should he wish that I should command others,—­I who did not know how to command myself at an epoch when my innocence was so dear to me, and when I knew that, in losing that, one is lost?”

As she said these words two nuns came to announce her Serene Highness, that is to say, her daughter, the Princesse de Conti.  I prayed Madame de la Valliere to keep between ourselves the communications that had just taken place in the intimacy of confidence.  She promised me with her usual candour.  I made a profound reverence to the daughter, embraced the mother weeping, and regained my carriage, which the Princess must have remarked on entering.

CHAPTER XVIII.

Reflections.—­The Future.—­The Refuge of Foresight.—­Community of Saint Joseph.—­Wicked Saying of Bossuet.

I wept much during the journey; and to save the spectacle of my grief from the passers-by, I was at the pains to lower the curtains.  I passed over in my mind all that the Duchess had said to me.  It was very easy for me to understand that the monarch’s heart had escaped me, and that, owing to his character, all resistance, all contradiction would be vain.  The figure, as it had been supernumerary and on sufferance, which the Duchess had made in the midst of the Court when she ceased to be loved, returned to my memory completely, and I felt I had not the courage to drink a similar cup of humiliation.

I reminded myself of what the prince had told me several times in those days when his keen affection for me led him to wish for my happiness, even in the future,—­even after his death, if I were destined to survive him.

“You ought,” he said to me, at those moments, “you ought to choose and assure yourself beforehand of an honourable retreat; for it is rarely that a king accords his respect or his good-will to the beloved confidante of his predecessor.”

Not wishing to ask a refuge of any one, but, on the contrary, being greatly set upon ruling in my own house, I resolved to build myself, not a formal convent like Val-de-Grace or Fontevrault, but a pretty little community, whose nuns, few in number, would owe me their entire existence, which would necessarily attach them to all my interests.  I held to this idea.  I charged my intendant to seek for me a site spacious enough for my enterprise; and when he had found it, had showed it to me, and had satisfied me with it, I had what rambling buildings there were pulled down, and began, with a sort of joy, the excavations and foundations.

The first blow of the hammer was struck, by some inconceivable fortuity, at the moment when the Duchesse de Fontanges expired.  Her death did not weaken my resolutions nor slacken my ardour.  I got away quite often to cast an eye over the work, and ordered my architect to second my impatience and spur on the numerous workmen.