The more he saw of her, the more effectually he came under her spell.  Each day found her in some new and tantalising mood; and as she drew him more and more into her toils, she kept him there by her ingenuity in devising novel pleasures and entertainments for him, until, within a month of setting eyes on her, he was telling Madame de Mailly, he “loved her sister more than herself.”  One of the first evidences of his favour was to provide her with a husband in the Comte de Vintimille, and a dower of two hundred thousand livres.  He promised her a post as lady-in-waiting to Madame la Dauphine and gave her a sumptuous suite of rooms at Versailles.  He even conferred on her husband the honour of handing him his shirt on the wedding-night, an evidence of high favour such as no other bridegroom had enjoyed.

It was thus little surprise to anyone to find the Comtesse-bride not only her sister’s most formidable rival, but actually usurping her place and privileges.  Nor was it long before this place, on which she had set her heart first within the walls of the Port Royal Convent, was unassailably hers; and Madame de Mailly, in tears and sadness, saw an unbridgeable gulf widen between her and the man she undoubtedly had grown to love.

That Felicite de Nesle had not over-estimated her powers of conquest was soon apparent.  Louis became her abject slave, humouring her caprices and submitting to her will.  And this will, let it be said to her credit, she exercised largely for his good.  She weaned him from his vicious ways; she stimulated whatever good remained in him; she tried, and in a measure succeeded in making a man of him.  Under her influence he began to realise that he was a King, and to play his exalted part more worthily.  He asserted himself in a variety of directions, from looking personally after the ordering of his household to taking the reins of State into his own hands.

Nor did she curtail his pleasures.  She merely gave them a saner direction.  Orgies and midnight revelry became things of the past, but their place was taken by delightful days spent at the Chateau of Choisy, that regal little pleasure-house between the waters of the Seine and the Forest of Senart, with all its marvels of costly and artistic furnishing.  Here one entertainment succeeded another, from the hunting which opened, to the card-games which closed the day.  A time of innocent delights which came sweet to the jaded palate of the King.

Thus the halcyon months passed, until, one August day in 1741, the Comtesse was seized with a slight fever; Louis, consumed by anxiety, spending the anxious hours by her bedside or pacing the corridor outside.  Two days later he was stooping to kiss an infant presented to him on a cushion of cramoisi velvet.  His happiness was crowned at last, and life spread before him a prospect of many such years.  But tragedy was already brooding over this scene of pleasure, although none, least of all the King, seemed to see the shadow of her wings.