Although Madame de la Tournelle was now installed in the palace, the day of Louis’ conquest had not arrived.  The gratification of his passion was still thwarted in several directions.  Not only was Madame de Mailly’s presence a difficulty and a reproach to him; his new favourite was by no means willing to respond to his advances.  Her heart was still engaged to the Due d’Agenois, and was not hers to dispose of.  Richelieu, however, was quick to dispose of this difficulty.  He sent the handsome Duc to Languedoc, exposed him to the attractions of a pretty woman, and before many weeks had passed, was able to show Madame de la Tournelle passionate letters addressed to her rival by her lover, as evidence of the worthlessness of his vows; thus arming her pride against him and disposing her at last to lend a more favourable ear to the King.

As for Madame de Mailly, her shrift was short.  In spite of her tears, her pleadings, her caresses, Louis made no concealment of his intention to be rid of her.  “No sorrow, no humiliation was lacking in the death-struggle of love.  The King spared her nothing.  He did not even spare her those harsh words which snap the bonds of the most vulgar liaisons.”  And the climax came when he told the heart-broken woman, as she cringed pitifully at his feet, “You must go away this very day.”  “My sacrifices are finished,” she sobbed, a little later to the “Judas,” Richelieu, when, with friendly words, he urged her to humour the King and go away at least for a time; “it will be my death, but I will be in Paris to-night.”

And while Madame de Mailly was carrying her crushed heart through the darkness to her exile, the King and Richelieu, disguised in large perukes and black coats, were stealing across the great courtyards to the rooms of Madame de la Tournelle, where the King’s long waiting was to have its reward.  And, the following day, the usurper was callously writing to a friend, “Doubtless Meuse will have informed you of the trouble I had in ousting Madame de Mailly; at last I obtained a mandate to the effect that she was not to return until she was sent for.”

“No portrait,” says de Goncourt, referring to this letter, “is to be compared with such a confession.  It is the woman herself with the cynicism of her hardness, her shameless and cold-blooded ingratitude....  It is as though she drives her sister out by the two shoulders with those words which have the coarse energy of the lower orders.”

Louis, at last happy in the achievement of his desire, was not long in discovering that in the third of the Nesle sisters he had his hands more full than with either of her predecessors.  Madame de Mailly and the Comtesse de Vintimille had been content to play the role of mistress, and to receive the King’s none too lavish largesse with gratitude.  Madame de la Tournelle was not so complaisant, so easily satisfied.  She intended—­and she lost no time in making the King aware of her intention—­to have her position recognised by the world at large, to reign as Montespan had reigned, to have the Treasury placed at her disposal, and her children, if she had any, made legitimate.  Her last stipulation was that she should be made a Duchess before the end of the year.  And to all these proposals Louis gave a meek assent.