“Opportune answers him with a stately air which would astound you; she only calls him monsieur, and when told that she has made an error, and that she should say monseigneur, she replies with great seriousness, ’I had forgotten it.’”

Mademoiselle Albanier, out of kindness to me, passed nearly two years in this house, which she always called her purgatory, but the endeavours of the superior and of M. Bossuet becoming daily more pressing, and her health, which had suffered, being unable to support the seclusion longer, she made up her mind to retire.

Her departure was a terrible blow to the daughter of the Queen.  This young person, who was by nature affectionate, almost died of grief at the separation.  We learnt that, after having been ill and then ailing for several weeks, she found the means of escaping from the convent, and of taking refuge with some lordly chatelaine.  M. de Meaux had her pursued, but as she threatened to kill herself if she were taken back to the Abbey of Notre Dame, the prelate wrote to M. Bontems, that is to say, to the real father, and poor Opportune was taken to Moret, a convent of Benedictines, in the forest of Fontainebleau.  There they took the course of lavishing care, and kindness, and attentions on her.  But as her destiny, written in her cradle, was an irrevocable sentence, she was finally made to take the veil, which suited her admirably, and which she wears with an infinite despair.

I disguised myself one day as a lady suitor who sought a lodging in the house.  I established myself there for a week, under the name of the Comtesse de Clagny, and I saw, with my own eyes, a King’s daughter reduced to singing matins.  Her air of nobility and dignity struck me with admiration and moved me to tears.  I thought of her four sisters, dead at such an early age, and deplored the cruelty of Fate, which had spared her in her childhood to kill her slowly and by degrees.

I would have accosted her in the gardens, and insinuated myself into her confidence, but the danger of these interviews, both for her and me, restrained what had been an ill-judged kindness.  We should both have gone too far, and the monarch would have been able to think that I was opposing him out of revenge, and to give him pain.

This consideration came and crushed all my projects of compassion and kindness.  There are situations in life where we are condemned to see evil done in all liberty, without being able to call for succour or complain.

CHAPTER XLIV.

The Aristocratic Republic of Genoa Offends the King.—­Its
Punishment.—­Reception of the Doge at Paris and Versailles.

M. de Louvois—­by nature, as I have said, hard and despotic—­was quite satisfied to gain the same reputation for the King, in order to cover his own violence and rigour beneath the authority of the monarch.