It was after one such privileged hour that Louis, with childish pleasure, handed to his favourite the patent, creating her Duchesse de Chateauroux, enclosed in a casket of gold; and with it a rapturous letter in which he promised her a pension of eighty-thousand livres, the better to maintain her new dignity!

Having thus achieved her greatest ambition, the Duchesse (as we must now call her) aspired to play a leading part in the affairs of Europe.  France and Prussia were leagued in war against the forces of England, Austria, and Holland.  This was a seductive game in which to take a hand, and thus we find her stimulating the sluggard kingliness in her lover, urging him to leave his debauches and to lead his armies to victory, assuring him of the gratitude and admiration of his subjects.  Nothing less, she told him, would save his country from disaster.

To this appeal and temptation Louis was not slow to respond; and in May, 1744, we find him, to the delight of his soldiers and all France, at the seat of war, reviewing his troops, speaking words of high courage to them, visiting hospitals and canteens, and actually sending back a haughty message to the Dutch:  “I will give you your answer in Flanders.”  No wonder the army was roused to enthusiasm, or that it exclaimed with one voice, “At last we have found a King!”

So strong was Louis in his new martial resolve that he actually refused Madame de Chateauroux permission to accompany him.  France was delighted that at last her King had emancipated himself from petticoat influence, but the delight was short-lived, for before he had been many days in camp the Duchesse made her stately appearance, and saws and hammers were at work making a covered way between the house assigned to her and that occupied by the King.  A fortnight later Ypres had fallen, and she was writing to Richelieu, “This is mighty pleasant news and gives me huge pleasure.  I am overwhelmed with joy, to take Ypres in nine days.  You can think of nothing more glorious, more flattering to the King; and his great-grandfather, great as he was, never did the like!”

But grief was coming quickly on the heels of joy.  The King was seized with a sudden and serious illness, after a banquet shared with his ally, the King of Prussia; and in a few days a malignant fever had brought him face to face with death.  Madame de Chateauroux watched his sufferings with the eyes of despair.  “Leaning over the pillow of the dying man, aghast and trembling, she fights for him with sickness and death, terror and remorse.”  With locked door she keeps her jealous watch by his bedside, allowing none to enter but Richelieu, the doctors, and nurses, whilst outside are gathered the Princes of the Blood and the great officers of the Court, clamouring for admittance.

It was a grim environment for the death-bed of a King, this struggle for supremacy, in which a frail woman defied the powers of France for the monopoly of his last hours.  And chief of all the terrors that assailed her was the dread of that climax to it all, when her lover would have to make his last confession, the price of his absolution being, as she well knew, a final severance from herself.