Among all the fair and frail women who succeeded one another in his affection three stand out from the rest with a prominence which his special favour assigned to each in turn.  For ten early years it was Louise de la Baume-Leblanc (better known to fame as the Duchesse de Lavalliere) who reigned as his uncrowned Queen, and who gave her life to his pleasure and to the care of the children she bore to him.  But such constancy could not last for ever in a man so constitutionally inconstant as Louis.  When the Marquise de Montespan, in all her radiant and sensuous loveliness, came on the scene, she drew the King to her arms as a flame lures the moth.  Her voluptuous charms, her abounding vitality and witty tongue, made the more refined beauty and the gentleness of the Duchesse flavourless in comparison; and Louise, realising that her sun had set, retired to spend the rest of her life in the prayers and piety of a convent, leaving her brilliant rival in undisputed possession of the field.

For many years Madame de Montespan, the most consummate courtesan who ever enslaved a King, queened it over Louis in her magnificent apartments at Versailles and in the Tuileries.  He was never weary of showering rich gifts and favours on her; and, in return, she became the mother of his children and ministered to his every whim, little dreaming of the day when she in turn was to be dethroned by an insignificant widow whom she regarded as the creature of her bounty, and who so often awaited her pleasure in her ante-room.

* * * * *

When Francoise d’Aubigne was cradled, one November day in the year 1635, within the walls of a fortress-prison in Poitou, the prospect of a Queendom seemed as remote as a palace in the moon.  She had good blood in her veins, it is true.  Her ancestors had been noblemen of Normandy before the Conqueror ever thought of crossing the English Channel, and her grandfather, General Theodore d’Aubigne, had won distinction as a soldier on many a battlefield.  It was to her father, profligate and spendthrift, who, after squandering his patrimony, had found himself lodged in jail, that Francoise owed the ignominy of her birthplace, for her mother had insisted on sharing the captivity of her ne’er-do-well husband.

When at last Constant d’Aubigne found his prison doors opened, he shook the dust of France off his feet and took his wife and young children away to Martinique, where at least, he hoped, his record would not be known.  On the voyage, we are told, the child was brought so near to death’s door by an illness that her body was actually on the point of being flung overboard when her mother detected signs of life, and rescued her from a watery grave.  A little later, in Martinique, she had an equally narrow escape from death as the result of a snakebite.  A child thus twice miraculously preserved was evidently destined for better things than an early tomb, more than one declared; and so indeed it proved.