I easily perceived that we had been cherishing an utterly fantastic scheme, and I counselled Madame de Thianges to prefer to please the King; and, as she was never able to control her feelings, she sharply replied, “Madame la Marquise, good day or good night!”

The King, however, did not relax his persistence in giving us the Duc de Nevers as son-in-law and nephew; and as this young gentleman’s one fault is to require perpetual amusement, partly derived from poetry and partly from incessant travelling, my niece is as happy with him as a woman who takes her husband’s place well can be.  As soon as he gets to Paris, he wants to return to Rome, and hardly has he reached Rome, when he has the horses put to for Paris.

CHAPTER XXXIV.

Mademoiselle de Mortemart, Abbess of Fontevrault.—­She Comes to Court.—­The Cloister.—­Her Success at Court.—­Her Opinion Respecting Madame de Montespan’s Intimacy with the King.

My second sister, Mademoiselle de Mortemart, was so unfortunate as to fall in love with a young Knight of Malta, doomed from his birth and by his family to celibacy.  Having set out upon his caravans,—­[Sea-fights against the Turks and the pirates of the Mediterranean.]—­he was killed in combat by the Algerians.

Such was Mademoiselle de Mortemart’s grief that life became unbearable to her.  Beautiful, witty, and accomplished, she quitted the world where she was beloved, and, at the, age of seventeen, took the veil at Fontevrault.

So severely had she blamed the conduct of Mademoiselle de la Valliere, while often vehemently denouncing that which she termed the disorder at Court, that, since the birth of the Duc du Maine, I had not gone to the convent to see her.  We were like unto persons both most anxious to break off an intimacy and yet who had not done so.

The Duc de Lorraine was known to her.  He wrote to her, begging her to make it up with me, so as to further his own ends.  To gratify him, and mainly because of her attachment to Prince Charles, my sister actually wrote to me, asking for my intervention and what she termed my support.

Nuns always profess to be, and think that they are, cut off from the world.  But the fact is, they care far more for mundane grandeur than we do.  Madame de Thianges and her sister would have given their very heart’s blood to see my niece the bride of a royal prince.

One day the King said to me, “The Marquise de Thianges complains that I have as yet done nothing for your family; there is a wealthy abbey that has just become vacant; I am going to give it to your sister, the nun; since last night she is the Abbess of Fontevrault.”

I thanked the King, as it behoved me to do, and he added, “Your brother shall be made a duke at once.  I am going to appoint him general of Royal Galleys, and after one or two campaigns he will have a marshal’s baton.”