During her flight to safety, we are told, “the principal inns in the towns and villages through which she passed refused to receive her”; and more than once she was compelled to sleep on straw and suffer the insults of the populace, which reviled her as sorceress and poisoner.  “We are assured,” Madame de Sevigne writes, “that the gates of Namur, Antwerp, and other towns have been closed against the Countess, the people crying out, ’We want no poisoner here’!” Even at Brussels, whenever she ventured into the streets she was assailed by a storm of insults; and on one occasion, when she entered a church, “a number of people rushed out, collected all the black cats they could find, tied their tails together, and brought them howling and spitting into the porch, crying out that they were devils who were following the Comtesse.”

In the face of such chilling hospitality Madame de Soissons was not tempted to make a long stay in Brussels; and after a few months of restless wandering in Flanders and Germany, she drifted to Spain where she succeeded in ingratiating herself with the Queen.  She found little welcome however from the King, who, as the French Ambassador to Madrid wrote, “was warned against her.  He accused her of sorcery, and I learn that, some days ago, he conceived the idea that, had it not been for a spell she had cast over him, he would have had children....  The life of the Comtesse de Soissons consists in receiving at her house all persons who desire to come there, from four o’clock in the evening up to two or three hours after midnight.  There is, sire, everything that can convey an air of familiarity and contempt for the house of a woman of quality.”

That Carlos’ suspicions were not without reason was proved when one day his Queen, after, it is said, drinking a glass of milk handed to her by the Comtesse, was taken suddenly ill and expired after three days of terrible suffering.  That she died of poison, like her mother, the ill-fated sister of our second Charles, seems probable; but that the poison was administered by the Comtesse, whose friend and protectress she was and who had every reason to wish her well, is less to be believed, in spite of Saint-Simon’s unequivocal accusation.  Certainly the crime was not proved against her; for we find her still in Spain in the following spring, when Carlos, his patience exhausted, ordered her to leave the country.

After a short stay in Portugal and Germany, Madame de Soissons was back in Brussels, where she spent the brief remainder of her days—­“all the French of distinction who visited the City” (to quote Saint-Simon) “being strictly forbidden to visit her.”  Here, on the 9th October, 1690, her beauty but a memory, bankrupt in reputation, friendless and poor, the curtain fell on the life so full of mis-used gifts and baffled ambitions.

CHAPTER XXVIII

AN ILL-FATED MARRIAGE