With Madame de Tencin, a woman as scheming and with as evil a reputation as himself, for chief ally, the Due determined to find another mistress who should finally oust Madame de Mailly from Louis’ favour; and her he found in a woman, devoted to himself and his interests, and of such surpassing loveliness that, when the King first saw her at Petit Bourg, he exclaimed, “Heavens! how beautiful she is!”

Such was the involuntary tribute Louis paid at first sight to the charms of Madame de la Tournelle, who was now fated to take the place of her dead sister, Madame de Vintimille, just as the Comtesse had supplanted another sister, Madame de Mailly.

CHAPTER XXVI

THE RIVAL SISTERS—­continued

Louis XV.’s involuntary exclamation when he first set eyes on the loveliness of Madame de la Tournelle, “Heavens! how beautiful she is!” becomes intelligible when we look on Nattier’s picture of this fairest of the de Nesle sisters in his “Allegory of the Daybreak,” and read the contemporary descriptions of her charms.

“She ravished the eye,” we are told, “with her skin of dazzling whiteness, her elegant carriage, her free gestures, the enchanting glance of her big blue eyes—­a gaze of which the cunning was veiled by sentiment—­by the smile of a child, moist lips, a bosom surging, heaving, ever agitated by the flux and reflux of life, by a physiognomy at once passionate and mutinous.”  And to these seductions were added a sunny temperament, an infectious gaiety of spirit, and a playful wit which made her infinitely attractive to men much less susceptible that the amorous Louis.

It is little wonder then that in the reaction which followed his stormy grief for his dead love, the Comtesse de Vintimille, he should turn from the lachrymose companionship of Madame de Mailly to bask in the sunshine of this third of the beautiful sisters, Madame de la Tournelle, and that the wish to possess her should fire his blood.  But Madame de la Tournelle was not to prove such an easy conquest as her two sisters, who had come almost unasked to his arms.

At the time when she came thus dramatically into his life she was living with Madame de Mazarin, a strong-minded woman who had no cause to love Louis, who had thwarted and opposed him more than once, and who was determined at any cost to keep her protegee and pet out of his clutches.  And his desires had also two other stout opponents in Cardinal Fleury, his old mentor, and Maurepas, the most subtle and clever of his ministers, each of whom for different reasons was strongly averse to this new and dangerous liaison, which would make him the tool of Richelieu’s favourite and Richelieu’s party.