Over this protracted and unseemly duel, in which blows were exchanged, entrance was forced, and Princes and ministers crowded indecently around the King’s bed; over the Duchesse’s tearful pleadings with the confessor to spare her the disgrace of dismissal, we must hasten to the crowning moment when Louis, feeling that he was dying, hastily summoned a confessor, who, a few moments later, flung open the door of the closet in which the Duchesse was waiting and weeping, and pronounced the fatal words, “The King commands you to leave his presence immediately.”

Then followed that secret flight to Paris, “amidst a torrent of maledictions,” the Duchesse hiding herself from view as best she could, and at each town and village where horses were changed, slinking back and taking refuge in some by-road until she could resume her journey.  Then it was that in her grief and despair she wrote to Richelieu, “Oh, my God! what a thing it all is!  I give you my word, it is all over with me!  One would need to be a poor fool to start it all over again.”

But Louis was by no means a dead man.  From the day on which he received absolution from his manifold sins he made such haste to recover that, within a month, he was well again and eager to fly to the arms of the woman he had so abruptly abandoned with all other earthly vanities.  It was one thing, however, to dismiss the Duchesse, and quite another to call her back.  For a time she refused point-blank to look again on the King who had spurned her from fear of hell; and when at last she consented to receive the penitent at Versailles she let him know, in no vague terms, that “it would cost France too many heads if she were to return to his Court.”

Vengeance on her enemies was the only price she would accept for forgiveness, and this price Louis promised to pay in liberal measure.  One after the other, those who had brought about her humiliation were sent to disgrace or exile—­from the Duc de Chatillon to La Rochefoucauld and Perusseau.  Maurepas, the most virulent of them all, the King declined to exile, but he consented to a compromise.  He should be made to offer Madame an abject apology, to grovel at her feet, a punishment with which she was content.  And when the great minister presented himself by her bedside, in fear and trembling, to express his profound penitence and to beg her to return to Court, all she answered was, “Give me the King’s letters and go!”

The following Saturday she fixed on as the day of her triumphant return—­“but it was death that was to raise her from the bed on which she had received the King’s submission at the hands of his Prime Minister.”  Within twenty-four hours she was seized with violent convulsions and delirium.  In her intervals of consciousness she shrieked aloud that she had been poisoned, and called down curses on her murderer—­Maurepas.  For eleven days she passed from one delirious attack to another, and as many times she was bled.  But all the skill of the Court physicians was powerless to save her, and at five o’clock in the morning of the 8th December the Duchesse drew her last tortured breath in the arms of Madame de Mailly, the sister she had so cruelly wronged.