“My dear cousin,” said this dull-witted young lord, “I shall count the hours until you go to Spain.  You will send me some ‘touru’, for I am very fond of it?”

The King could not but find this reflection of his son very silly and out of place.  But intelligence is neither to be given nor communicated by example.  His Majesty had to support to the end this son, legitimate as much as you like, but altogether in degree, and with a person which formed a perpetual contrast with the person of the King.  It was my Duc du Maine who should have been in the eminent position of Monseigneur.  Nature willed it so.  She had proved it sufficiently by lavishing all her favours on him, all her graces; but the laws of convention and usage would not have it.  His Majesty has made this same reflection, groaning, more than once.

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: