Whilst agitated in this manner, without being able to make up her mind, she learned that the King was in extreme danger, a danger exaggerated by rumour.  Fear seized her lest he should die whilst she was in his realm.  She set off immediately, therefore, without knowing where to go; and solely to leave France went to Chambery, as the nearest place of safety, arriving there out of breath, so to say.

Every place being well examined, she preferred Genoa; its liberty pleased her; there was intercourse there with a rich and numerous nobility; the climate and the city were beautiful; the place was in some sort a centre and halting-point between Madrid, Paris, and Rome, with which places she was always in communication, and always hungered after all that passed there.  Genoa determined on, she went there.  She was well received, hoped to fix her tabernacle there, and indeed stayed some years.  But at last ennui seized her; perhaps vexation at not being made enough of.  She could not exist without meddling, and what is there for a superannuated woman to meddle with at Genoa?  She turned her thoughts, therefore, towards Rome.  Then, on sounding, found her course clear, quitted Genoa, and returned to her nest.

She was not long there before she attached herself to the King and Queen of England (the Pretender and his wife), and soon governed them openly.  What a poor resource!  But it was courtly and had a flavour of occupation for a woman who could not exist without movement.  She finished her life there remarkably healthy in mind and body, and in a prodigious opulence, which was not without its use in that deplorable Court.  For the rest, Madame des Ursins was in mediocre estimation at Rome, was deserted by the Spanish, little visited by the French, but always faithfully paid by France and Spain, and unmolested by the Regent.  She was always occupied with the world, and with what she had been, but was no longer; yet without meanness, nay, with courage and dignity.

The loss she experienced in January, 1720, of the Cardinal de la Tremoille, although there was no real friendship between them, did not fail, to create a void in her.  She survived him three years, preserved all her health, her strength, her mind until death, and was carried off, more than eighty years of age, at Rome, on the 5th of December, 1722, after a very short illness.

She had the pleasure of seeing Madame de Maintenon forgotten and annihilated in Saint-Cyr, of surviving her, of seeing at Rome her two enemies, Giudice and Alberoni, as profoundly disgraced as she,—­one falling from the same height, and of relishing the forgetfulness, not to say contempt, into which they both sank.  Her death, which, a few years before, would have resounded throughout all Europe, made not the least sensation.  The little English Court regretted her, and some private friends also, of whom I was one.  I did not hide this, although,—­on account of M. le Duc d’Orleans, I had kept up