The King always hated or loved as she chose to direct; it was not, therefore, surprising that he could not bear Montespan, for all her failings were displayed to him by the old woman, who was materially assisted in this office by Montespan’s eldest son, the Duc du Maine.  In her latter years she enjoyed a splendour which she could never have dreamed of before; the Court looked upon her as a sort of divinity.

The old lady never failed to manifest her hatred of my son on all occasions.  She liked my husband no better than myself; and my son and my daughter and her husband were equally objects of her detestation.  She told a lady once that her greatest fault was that of being attached to me.  Neither my son nor I had ever done her any injury.  If Monsieur thought fit to tell his niece, the Duchess of Burgundy, a part of Maintenon’s history, in the vexation he felt at her having estranged the Princess from him, and not choosing that she should behave affectionately to her great-uncle, that was not our fault.  She was as jealous of the Dauphine as a lover is of his mistress.

She was in the habit of saying, “I perceive there is a sort of vertigo at present affecting the whole world.”  When she perceived that the harvest had failed, she bought up all the corn she could get in the markets, and gained by this means an enormous sum of money, while the poor people were dying of famine.  Not having a sufficient number of granaries, a large quantity of this corn became rotten in the boats loaded with it, and it was necessary to throw it into the river.  The people said this was a just judgment from Heaven.

My son made me laugh the other day.  I asked him how Madame de Maintenon was.

“Wonderfully well,” he replied.

“That is surprising at her age,” I said.

“Yes,” he rejoined, “but do you not know that God has, by way, of punishing the devil, doomed him to exist a certain number of years in that ugly body?”

Montespan was the cause of the King’s love for old Maintenon.  In the first place, when she wished to have her near her children, she shut her ears to the stories which were told of the irregular life which the hussy had been leading; she made everybody who spoke to the King about her, praise her; her virtue and piety were cried up until the King was made to think that all he had heard of her light conduct were lies, and in the end he most firmly believed it.  In the second place, Montespan was a creature full of caprice, who had no control over herself, was passionately fond of amusement, was tired whenever she was alone with the King, whom she loved only, for the purposes of her own interest or ambition, caring very little for him personally.  To occupy him, and to prevent him from observing her fondness for play and dissipation, she brought Maintenon.  The King was fond of a retired life, and would willingly have passed his time alone with Montespan; he often reproached her