One early day in December, Madame de Vintimille was seized with a severe illness, as sudden as it was mysterious.  Physicians were hastily summoned from Paris, only, to Louis’ despair, to declare that they could do nothing to save the life of the Comtesse.  “Tortured by excruciating pain,” says de Goncourt, “struggling against a death which was full of terror, and which seemed to point to the violence of poison, the dying woman sent for a confessor.  She died almost instantly in his arms before the Sacraments could be administered.  And as the confessor, charged with the dead woman’s last penitent message to her sister, entered Madame de Mailly’s salon, he dropped dead.”

Here, indeed, was tragedy in its most sudden and terrible form!  The King was stunned, incredulous.  He refused to believe that the woman he had so lately clasped in his arms, so warm, so full of life, was dead.  And when at last the truth broke on him with crushing force, he was as a man distraught.  “He shut himself up in his room, and listened half-dead to a Mass from his bed.”  He would not allow any but the priest to come near him; he repulsed all efforts at consolation.

And whilst Louis was thus alone with his demented grief, “thrust away in a stable of the palace, lay the body of the dead woman, which had been kept for a cast to be taken; that distorted countenance, that mouth which had breathed out its soul in a convulsion, so that the efforts of two men were required to close it for moulding, the already decomposing remains of Madame de Vintimille served as a plaything and a laughing-stock to the children and lackeys.”

When the storm of his grief at last began to abate, the King retired to his remote country-seat of Saint Leger, carrying his broken heart with him—­and also Madame de Mailly, as sharer of his sorrow; for it was to the woman whom he had so lightly discarded that he first turned for solace.  At Saint Leger he passed his days in reading and re-reading the two thousand letters the dead Comtesse had written to him, sprinkling their perfumed pages with his tears.  And when he was not thus burying himself in the past, he was a prey to the terrors that had obsessed his childhood—­the fear of death and of hell.

At supper—­the only meal which he shared with others, he refused to touch meat, “in order that he might not commit sin on every side”; if a light word was spoken he would rebuke the speaker by talk of death and judgment; and if his eyes met those of Madame de Mailly, he burst into tears and was led sobbing from the room.

The communion of grief gradually awoke in him his old affection for Madame de Mailly; and for a time it seemed not unlikely that she might regain her lost supremacy.  But the discarded mistress had many enemies at Court, who were by no means willing to see her re-established in favour—­the chief of them, the Duc de Richelieu, the handsomest man and the “hero” of more scandalous amours than any other in France—­a man, moreover, of crafty brain, who had already acquired an ascendancy over the King’s mind.