Since the flight or exile of his lady mother, he had taken it into his head to dream of the episcopate, and to solicit Pere de la Chaise on the subject.  But the King, who does not like frivolous or absurd figures in high offices, decided that a little man with a deformity would repel rather than attract deference at a pinnacle of dignity of the priesthood.

Refused for the episcopate, M. de Soissons thought he might offer himself as a colonel.  His Majesty, who did not know the military ways of this abbe, refused him anew, both as an abbe and as a hunchback, and as a public libertine already degraded by his irregularities.

From all these refusals and mortifications there sprung his firm resolve to quit France.  He had been born there; he left all his family there except his mother; he declared himself its undying enemy, and said publicly in Germany that Louis XIV. would shed tears of blood for the injury and the affront which he had offered him.

Mm. de Conti, after the events in Hungary and at Vienna, returned to France covered with laurels.  They came to salute the King at Versailles.  His Majesty gave them neither a good nor a bad reception.  The Princes left the same day for Chantilly, where M. de Conde, their paternal uncle, tried to curb their too romantic imaginations and guaranteed their good behaviour in the future.

This life, sedentary or spent in hunting, began to weary them, when overruling Providence was pleased to send them a diversion of the highest importance.  M. le Prince de Conti was seized suddenly with that burning fever which announces the smallpox.  Every imaginable care was useless; he died of it and bequeathed, in spite of himself, a most premature and afflicting widowhood to his young and charming spouse, who was not, till long afterwards, let into the secret of his scandalous excesses.

M. de la Roche-sur-Yon, his only brother, was as distressed at his death as though he had nothing to gain by it; he took immediately the name of Conti, and doffed the other, which he had hitherto borne as a borrowed title.  The domain and county of La Roche-sur-Yon belongs to the Grande Mademoiselle.  She had been asked to make this condescension when the young Prince was born.  She agreed with a good grace, for the child, born prematurely, did not seem likely to live.

CHAPTER XXXV.

Ninon at Court.—­The King behind the Glass.—­Anxiety of the Marquise on the Subject of This Interview.—­Visit to Madame de Maintenon.—­Her Reply and Her Ambiguous Promise.

Mademoiselle de l’Enclos is universally known in the world for the agreeableness of her superior wit and her charms of face and person.  When Madame de Maintenon, after the loss of her father, arrived from Martinique, she had occasion to make her acquaintance; and it seems that it was Ninon who, seeing her debating between the offers of M. Scarron and the cloister, succeeded in persuading her to marry the rich poet, though he was a cripple, rather than to bury herself, so young, in a convent of Ursulines or Bernardines, even were the convent in Paris.