On Friday, the 5th of February, the Duc de Noailles gave a very fine box full of excellent Spanish snuff to the Dauphine, who took some, and liked it.  This was towards the end of the morning.  Upon entering her cabinet (closed to everybody else), she put this box upon the table, and left it there.  Towards the evening she was seized with trembling fits of fever.  She went to bed, and could not rise again even to go to the King’s cabinet after the supper.  On Saturday, the 6th of February, the Dauphine, who had had fever all night, did not fail to rise at her ordinary hour, and to pass the day as usual; but in the evening the fever returned.  She was but middling all that night, a little worse the next day; but towards ten o’clock at night she was suddenly seized by a sharp pain under the temple.  It did not extend to the dimensions of a ten sous piece, but was so violent that she begged the King, who was coming to see her, not to enter.  This kind of madness of suffering lasted without intermission until Monday, the 8th, and was proof against tobacco chewed and smoked, a quantity of opium, and two bleedings in the arms.  Fever showed itself more then this pain was a little calmed; the Dauphine said she had suffered more than in child-birth.

Such a violent illness filled the chamber with rumours concerning the snuff-box given to the Dauphine by the Duc de Noailles.  In going to bed the day she had received it and was seized by fever, she spoke of the snuff to her ladies, highly praising it and the box, which she told one of them to go and look for upon the table in the cabinet, where, as I have said, it had been left.  The box could not be found, although looked for high and low.  This disappearance had seemed very extraordinary from the first moment it became known.  Now, joined to the grave illness with which the Dauphine was so cruelly assailed, it aroused the most sombre suspicions.  Nothing, however, was breathed of these suspicions, beyond a very restricted circle; for the Princess took snuff with the knowledge of Madame de Maintenon, but without that of the King, who would have made a fine scene if he had discovered it.  This was what was feared, if the singular loss of the box became divulged.

Let me here say, that although one of my friends, the Archbishop of Rheims, believed to his dying day that the Duc de Noailles had poisoned the Dauphine by means of this box of Spanish snuff, I never could induce myself to believe so too.  The Archbishop declared that in the manner of the Duc de Noailles, after quitting the chamber of the Princess, there was something which suggested both confusion and contentment.  He brought forward other proofs of guilt, but they made no impression upon me.  I endeavoured, on the contrary, to shake his belief, but my labour was in vain.  I entreated him, however, at least to maintain the most profound silence upon this horrible thought, and he did so.

Those who afterwards knew the history of the box—­and they were in good number—­were as inaccessible to suspicion as I; and nobody thought of charging the Duc de Noailles with the offence it was said he had committed.  As for me, I believed in his guilt so little that our intimacy remained the same; and although that intimacy grew even up to the death of the King, we never spoke of this fatal snuff-box.