Some days afterwards the monarch, of his own accord and without any incentive, remembered the offensive and mortifying pyramid; but Madame de Maintenon reminded him that it was desirable to wait, for scoffers would not be wanting to say that this demolition was one of the essential conditions of the bargain.

The King relished this advice.  At the Court one must make haste to obtain anything; but to be forgotten, a few minutes’ delay is sufficient.

[This pyramid was taken down two or three years before the Revolution by the wish of Louis XVI., after having stood for two hundred years.—­Editor’s note.]

CHAPTER XLIII.

Little Opportune.—­M. and Madame Bontems.—­The Young Moor Weaned.—­The Good Cure.—­The Blessed Virgin.—­Opportune at the Augustinians of Meaux.—­Bossuet Director.—­Mademoiselle Albanier and Leontine.—­Flight of Opportune.—­Her Threats of Suicide.—­Visit of the Marquise.—­Prudence of the Court.

The poor Queen had had several daughters, all divinely well made and pretty as little Cupids.  They kept in good health up to their third or fourth year; they went no further.  It was as though a fate was over these charming creatures; so that the King and Queen trembled whenever the accoucheurs announced a daughter instead of a son.

My readers remember the little negress who was born to the Queen in the early days,—­she whom no one wanted, who was dismissed, relegated, disinherited, unacknowledged, deprived of her rank and name the very day of her birth; and who, by a freak of destiny, enjoyed the finest health in the world, and surmounted, without any precautions or care, all the difficulties, perils, and ailments of infancy.

M. Bontems, first valet de chambre of the cabinets, served as her guardian, or curator; even he acted only through the efforts and movements of an intermediary.  It was wished that this young Princess should be ignorant of her birth, and in this I agree that, in the midst of crying injustice, the King kept his natural humanity.  This poor child not being meant, and not being able, to appear at Court, it was better, indeed, to keep her from all knowledge of her rights, in order to deprive her, at one stroke, of the distress of her conformation, the hardship of her repudiation, and the despair of captivity.  The King destined her for a convent when he saw her born, and M. Bontems promised that it should be so.

At the age of three, she was withdrawn from the hands of her nurse, and Madame Bontems put her to be weaned in her own part of the world.  Opportune,—­[She was born on Sainte Opportune’s Day.]—­clothed and nourished like the other children of the farmer, who was her new patron, played with them in the barns or amongst the snow; she followed them into the orchards and fields; she filled, like them, her little basket with acorns that had been left after the crop was