In order to be more at liberty he separated from the general officers, and established himself with his valets and two or three of his most familiar friends, cherished companions everywhere, at Vignarez, a little isolated hamlet, almost deserted, on the sea-shore and in the kingdom of Valencia.  His object was to eat fish there to his heart’s content.  He carried out that object, and filled himself to repletion for nearly a month.  He became unwell—­his diet, as may be believed, was enough to cause this—­but his illness increased so rapidly, and in so strange a manner, after having for a long time seemed nothing that the few around him suspected poison, and sent on all sides for assistance.  But the malady would not wait; it augmented rapidly with strange symptoms.  Vendome could not sign a will that was presented to him; nor a letter to the King, its which he asked that his brother might be permitted to return to Court.  Everybody near flew from him and abandoned him, so that he remained in the hands of three or four of the meanest valets, whilst the rest robbed him of everything and decamped.  He passed thus the last two or three days of his life, without a priest,—­no mention even had been made of one,—­without other help than that of a single surgeon.  The three or four valets who remained near him, seeing him at his last extremity, seized hold of the few things he still possessed, and for want of better plunder, dragged off his bedclothes and the mattress from under him.  He piteously cried to them at least not to leave him to die naked upon the bare bed.  I know not whether they listened to him.

Thus died on Friday, the 10th of June, 1712, the haughtiest of men; and the happiest, except in the later years of his life.  After having been obliged to speak of him so often, I get rid of him now, once and for ever.  He was fifty-eight years old; but in spite of the blind and prodigious favour he had enjoyed, that favour had never been able to make ought but a cabal hero out of a captain who was a very bad general, and a man whose vices were the shame of humanity.  His death restored life and joy to all Spain.

Aguilar, a friend of the Duc de Noailles, was accused of having poisoned him; but took little pains to defend himself, inasmuch as little pains were taken to substantiate the accusation.  The Princesse des Ursins, who had so well profited by his life in order to increase her own greatness, did not profit less by his death.  She felt her deliverance from a new Don Juan of Spain who had ceased to be supple in her hands, and who might have revived, in the course of time, all the power and authority he had formerly enjoyed in France.  She was not shocked them by the joy which burst out without constraint; nor by the free talk of the Court, the city, the army, of all Spain.  But in order to sustain what she had done, and cheaply pay her court to M. du Maine, Madame de Maintenon, and even to the King, she ordered that the corpse of this hideous