Under Madame de Mailly’s rule the Court of Versailles awoke to a new life.  “The little apartments grow animated, gay to the point of licence.  Noise, merriment, an even gayer and livelier clash of glasses, madder nights.”  Fete succeeded fete in brilliant sequence.  Each night saw its Royal debauch, with the King and his mistress for arch-spirits of the revels.  There were nightly banquets, with the rarest wines and the most costly viands, supplemented by salads prepared by the dainty hands of Mademoiselle de Charolois, and ragouts cooked by Louis himself in silver saucepans.  And these were followed by orgies which left the celebrants, in the last excesses of intoxication, to be gathered up at break of day and carried helpless to bed.

Such wild excesses could not fail sooner or later to bring satiety to a lover so unstable as Louis; and it was not long before he grew a little weary of his mistress, who, too assured of her conquest, began to exhibit sudden whims and caprices, and fits of obstinacy.  Her jealous eyes followed him everywhere, her reproaches, if he so much as smiled on a rival beauty, provoked daily quarrels.  He was drawn, much against his will, into her family disputes, and into the disgraceful affairs of her father, the dissolute Marquis de Nesle.

Meanwhile Madame de Mailly’s supremacy was being threatened in a most unexpected quarter.  Among the pupils of the convent school at Port Royal was a young girl, in whose ambitious brain the project was forming of supplanting the King’s favourite, and of ruling France and Louis at the same time.  The idle dream of a schoolgirl, of course!  But to Felicite de Nesle it was no vain dream, but the ambition of a lifetime, which dominated her more and more as the months passed in her convent seclusion.  If her sister, Madame de Mailly, had so easily made a conquest of the King, why should she, with less beauty, it is true, but with a much cleverer brain, despair?  And thus it was that every letter Madame received from her “little sister” pleaded for an invitation to Court, until at last Mademoiselle de Nesle found herself the guest of Louis’ mistress in his palace.

Thus the first important step was taken.  The rest would be easy; for Mademoiselle never doubted for a moment her ability to carry out her programme to its splendid climax.  It was certainly a bold, almost impudent design; for the girl of the convent had few attractions to appeal to a monarch so surrounded by beauty as the King of France.  What the courtiers saw, says the Duc de Richelieu, was “a long neck clumsily set on the shoulders, a masculine figure and carriage, features not unlike those of Madame de Mailly, but thinner and harder, which exhibited none of her flashes of kindness, her tenderness of passion.”

Even her manners seemed calculated to repel, rather than attract the man she meant to conquer; for she treated him, from the first, with a familiarity amounting almost to rudeness, and a wilfulness to which he was by no means accustomed.  There was, at any rate, something novel and piquant in an attitude so different from that of all other Court ladies.  Resentment was soon replaced by interest, and interest by attraction; until Louis, before he was aware of it, began to find the society of the impish, mocking, defiant maid from the convent more to his taste than that of the most fascinating women of his Court.