It may be imagined what a number of things were passed in review during this long discourse.  Our eight hours of conversation appeared to me like eight moments.  She related to me her catastrophe, without mixing up the King or the King of Spain, of whom she spoke well; but, without violently attacking the Queen, she predicted what since has occurred.  We separated at supper time, with a thousand reciprocal protestations and regret that Madame de Saint-Simon could not see her.  She promised to inform me of her departure early enough to allow us to pass another day together.

Her journey to Versailles did not pass off very pleasantly.  She dined with the Duchesse de Luders, and then visited Madame de Maintenon; waited with her for the King, but when he came did not stop long, withdrawing to Madame Adam’s, where she passed the night.  The next day she dined with the Duchesse de Ventadour, and returned to Paris.  She was allowed to give up the pension she received from the King, and in exchange to have her Hotel de Ville stock increased, so that it yielded forty thousand livres a-year.  Her income, besides being doubled, was thus much more sure than would have been a pension from the King, which she doubted not M. d’Orleans, as soon as he became master, would take from her.  She thought of retiring into Holland, but the States-General would have nothing to do with her, either at the Hague, or at Amsterdam.  She had reckoned upon the Hague.  She next thought of Utrecht, but was soon out of conceit with it, and turned her regards towards Italy.

The health of the King, meanwhile, visibly declining, Madame des Ursins feared lest she should entirely fall into the clutches of M. d’Orleans.  She fully resolved, therefore, to make off, without knowing, however, where to fix herself; and asked permission of the King to come and take leave of him at Marly.  She came there from Paris on Tuesday, the 6th of August, so as to arrive as he left dinner, that is, about ten o’clock.  She was immediately admitted into the cabinet of the King, with whom she remained tete-a-tete full half an hour.  She passed immediately to the apartments of Madame de Maintenon, with whom she remained an hour; and then got into her coach and returned to Paris.  I only knew of this leave-taking by her arrival at Marly, where I had some trouble in meeting her.  As chance would have it, I went in search of her coach to ask her people what had become of her, and was speaking to them when, to and behold! she herself arrived.  She seemed very glad to see me, and made me mount with her into her coach, where for little less than an hour we discoursed very freely.  She did not dissimulate from me her fears; the coldness the King and Madame de Maintenon had testified for her through all their politeness; the isolation she found herself in at the Court, even in Paris; and the uncertainty in which she was as to the choice of a retreat; all this in detail, and nevertheless without complaint,