At one of their earliest meetings the climax came.  Saxe was not the man to hesitate; while she already, in her thoughts, had made a full surrender.  In one great sweep he gathered her into his arms.  It appeared to her as if no man had ever laid his hand upon her until that moment.  She cried out: 

“Now, for the first time in my life, I seem to live!”

It was, indeed, the very first love which in her checkered career was really worthy of the name.  She had supposed that all such things were passed and gone, that her heart was closed for ever, that she was invulnerable; and yet here she found herself clinging about the neck of this impetuous soldier and showing him all the shy fondness and the unselfish devotion of a young girl.  From this instant Adrienne Lecouvreur never loved another man and never even looked at any other man with the slightest interest.  For nine long years the two were bound together, though there were strange events to ruffle the surface of their love.

Maurice de Saxe had been sired by a king.  He had the lofty ambition to be a king himself, and he felt the stirrings of that genius which in after years was to make him a great soldier, and to win the brilliant victory of Fontenoy, which to this very day the French are never tired of recalling.  Already Louis XV. had made him a marshal of France; and a certain restlessness came over him.  He loved Adrienne; yet he felt that to remain in the enjoyment of her witcheries ought not to be the whole of a man’s career.

Then the Grand Duchy of Courland—­at that time a vassal state of Poland, now part of Russia—­sought a ruler.  Maurice de Saxe was eager to secure its throne, which would make him at least semi-royal and the chief of a principality.  He hastened thither and found that money was needed to carry out his plans.  The widow of the late duke—­the Grand Duchess Anna, niece of Peter the Great, and later Empress of Russia—­as soon as she had met this dazzling genius, offered to help him to acquire the duchy if he would only marry her.  He did not utterly refuse.  Still another woman of high rank, the Grand Duchess Elizabeth of Russia, Peter the Great’s daughter, made him very much the same proposal.

Both of these imperial women might well have attracted a man like Maurice de Saxe, had he been wholly fancy-free, for the second of them inherited the high spirit and the genius of the great Peter, while the first was a pleasure-seeking princess, resembling some of those Roman empresses who loved to stoop that they might conquer.  She is described as indolent and sensual, and she once declared that the chief good in the world was love.  Yet, though she neglected affairs of state and gave them over to favorites, she won and kept the affections of her people.  She was unquestionably endowed with the magnetic gift of winning hearts.