To the intimacy between the Marechal d’Albret and Madame de Montespan, Madame de Maintenon owed the good fortune she met with fourteen or fifteen years later.  Madame de Montespan continually visited the Hotel d’Albret, and was much impressed with Madame Scarron.  She conceived a friendship for the obliging widow, and when she had her first children by the King—­M. du Maine and Madame la Duchesse, whom the King wished to conceal—­she proposed that they should be confided to Madame Scarron.  A house in the Marais was accordingly given to her, to lodge in with them, and the means to bring them up, but in the utmost secrecy.  Afterwards, these children were taken to Madame de Montespan, then shown to the King, and then by degrees drawn from secrecy and avowed.  Their governess, being established with them at the Court, more and more pleased Madame de Montespan, who several times made the King give presents to her.  He, on the other hand, could not endure her; what he gave to her, always little, was by excess of complaisance and with a regret that he did not hide.

The estate of Maintenon being for sale, Madame de Montespan did not let the King rest until she had drawn from him enough to buy it for Madame Scarron, who thenceforth assumed its name.  She obtained enough also for the repair of the chateau, and then attacked the King for means to arrange the garden, which the former owners had allowed to go to ruin.

It was at the toilette of Madame de Montespan that these demands were made.  The captain of the guards alone followed the King there.  M. le Marechal de Lorges, the truest man that ever lived, held that post then, and he has often related to me the scene he witnessed.  The King at first turned a deaf ear to the request of Madame de Montespan, and then refused.  Annoyed that she still insisted, he said he had already done more than enough for this creature; that he could not understand the fancy of Madame de Montespan for her, and her obstinacy in keeping her after he had begged her so many times to dismiss her; that he admitted Madame Scarron was insupportable to him, and provided he never saw her more and never heard speak of her, he would open his purse again; though, to say truth, he had already given too much to a creature of this kind!  Never did M. le Marechel de Lorges forget these words; and he has always repeated them to me and others precisely as they are given here, so struck was he with them, and much more after all that he saw since, so astonishing and so contradictory.  Madame de Montespan stopped short, very much troubled by having too far pressed the King.

M. du Maine was extremely lame; this was caused, it was said, by a fall he had from his nurse’s arms.  Nothing done for him succeeded; the resolution was then taken to send him to various practicians in Flanders, and elsewhere in the realm, then to the waters, among others to Bareges.  The letters that the governess wrote to Madame de Montespan, giving an account of these journeys, were shown to the King.  He thought them well written, relished them, and the last ones made his aversion for the writer diminish.