During her reign she did not fail to have causes for jealousy.  There was Mademoiselle de Fontange, who pleased the King sufficiently to become his mistress.  But she had no intellect, and without that it was impossible to maintain supremacy over the King.  Her early death quickly put an end to this amour.  Then there was Madame de Soubise, who, by the infamous connivance of her husband, prostituted herself to the King, and thus secured all sorts of advantages for that husband, for herself, and for her children.  The love of the King for her continued until her death, although for many years before that he had ceased to see her in private.  Then there was the beautiful Ludre, demoiselle of Lorraine, and maid of honour to Madame, who was openly loved for a moment.  But this amour was a flash of lightning, and Madame de Montespan remained triumphant.

Let us now pass to another kind of amour which astonished all the world as much as the other had scandalised it, and which the King carried with him to the tomb.  Who does not already recognise the celebrated Francoise d’Aubigne, Marquise de Maintenon, whose permanent reign did not last less than thirty-two years?

Born in the American islands, where her father, perhaps a gentleman, had gone to seek his bread, and where he was stifled by obscurity, she returned alone and at haphazard into France.  She landed at La Rochelle, and was received in pity by Madame de Neuillant, mother of the Marechale Duchesse de Navailles, and was reduced by that avaricious old woman to keep the keys of her granary, and to see the hay measured out to her horses, as I have already related elsewhere.  She came afterwards to Paris, young, clever, witty, and beautiful, without friends and without money; and by lucky chance made acquaintance with the famous Scarron.  He found her amiable; his friends perhaps still more so.  Marriage with this joyous and learned cripple appeared to her the greatest and most unlooked-for good fortune; and folks who were, perhaps, more in want of a wife than he, persuaded him to marry her, and thus raise this charming unfortunate from her misery.

The marriage being brought about, the new spouse pleased the company which went to Scarron’s house.  It was the fashion to go there:  people of the Court and of the city, the best and most distinguished went.  Scarron was not in a state to leave his house, but the charm of his genius, of his knowledge, of his imagination, of that incomparable and ever fresh gaiety which he showed in the midst of his afflictions, that rare fecundity, and that humour, tempered by so much good taste that is still admired in his writings, drew everybody there.

Madame Scarron made at home all sorts of acquaintances, which, however, at the death of her husband, did not keep her from being reduced to the charity of the parish of Saint-Eustace.  She took a chamber for herself and for a servant, where she lived in a very pinched manner.  Her personal charms by degrees improved her condition.  Villars, father of the Marechal; Beuvron, father of D’Harcourt; the three Villarceaux, and many others kept her.