Thus raised to the rank of a Princess of the Blood, Olympe was by no means the proud and happy woman she ought to have been.  She had, in fact, aspired much higher; she had had dreams of sharing the throne of France with her handsome young playmate, the King; and to Louis, wife though she now was, she had lost none of the attraction she possessed when he called her his “little sweetheart” in their childish games together.  “He continued to visit her with the greatest regularity,” to quote Mr Noel Williams; “indeed, scarcely a day went by on which His Majesty’s coach did not stop at the gate of the Hotel de Soissons; and Olympe, basking in the rays of the Royal favour, rapidly took her place as the brilliant, intriguing great lady Nature intended her to be.”

It is little wonder, perhaps, that Olympe’s foolish head was turned by such flattering attentions from her sovereign, or that she began to give herself airs and to treat members of the Royal family with a haughty patronage.  Even La Grande Mademoiselle did not escape her insolence; for, as she herself records, “when I paid her a thousand compliments and told her that her marriage had given me the greatest joy and that I hoped we should always be good friends, she answered me not a word.”

But Olympe’s supremacy was not to remain much longer unchallenged.  The King’s vagrant fancy was already turning to her younger sister, Marie, whose childish plainness had now ripened to a beauty more dazzling than her own—­the witchery of large and brilliant black eyes, a complexion of pure olive, luxuriant, jet-black hair, a figure of singular suppleness and grace, and a sprightliness of wit and a gaiete de coeur which the Comtesse could not hope to rival.  It soon began to be rumoured in Court that Louis spent hours daily in the company of Mazarin’s beautiful niece; a rumour which Hortense Mancini supports in her “Memoirs.”  “The presence of the King, who seldom stirred from our lodging, often interrupted us,” she says; “my sister, Marie, alone was undisturbed; and you can easily understand that his assiduity had charms for her, who was the cause of it, because it had none for others.”

And as Louis’ visits to the Mancini lodging became more and more frequent, each adding a fresh link to the chain that was binding him to her young sister, Madame de Soissons saw less and less of him, until an amused tolerance gave place to a genuine alarm.  It was nothing less than an outrage that she, who had so long held first place in the King’s favour, should be ousted by a “mere child,” the last person in the world whom she could have thought of as a rival.  But the Comtesse was no woman to be easily dethroned.  Although at every Court ball, fete, or ballet, Louis was now inseparable from her sister, she affected to ignore these open slights and lost no opportunity in public of vaunting her intimacy with His Majesty, even to the extent on one occasion, as Mademoiselle records, of taking Louis’ seat at a ball supper and compelling him to share it with her.