and imperious Marquise de Montespan assumed supremacy and became “the center of pleasures, of fortune, of hope and of terror to all that were dependent on the Court.”  No one could rightly claim to be an intimate of Montespan except the King, and at times he did not understand her.  While apparently frank and free in her enjoyment of life and in her dealings with associates in the Court, Montespan always withheld enough to keep her best friends guessing.  No one knew all her romance.  She had experienced both extremes of fortune and when she gained favor with Louis she had acquired a confidence and a command of herself that influenced the King to a degree that even he would not have acknowledged.  But the Court knew well the influence of Montespan and also the ministers, generals of the army and foreign ambassadors.  Montespan succeeded Madame de La Valliere in favor about 1667 and she held her supremacy for ten years.  Then came the turn of her fortunes, for Madame de Maintenon, fascinating in all that makes feminine charm and with an extraordinary mind in addition, supplanted Montespan and became the companion of the King until his dying day.  Montespan, who had eight children by the King, left the Court in bitterness and humiliation and, like La Valliere, ended her life in a convent.

Madame de Maintenon was the most distinguished woman in the history of Versailles.  As a girl, in abject poverty, she married in 1652 the good old poet Scarron.  There was no love lost there.  She merely took the gentle-hearted man because he offered either to pay for her entrance into a convent or to make her his wife, and she found the latter alternative more acceptable.  During the nine years she lived with Scarron, she maintained a brilliant salon, in which gathered the great intelluctual figures of the time.  In 1669 Madame de Montespan gave Madame de Maintenon the charge of one of her sons.  In that manner Montespan brought her governess in touch with her King, and, in so doing, sealed her own fate.

Madame de Maintenon was a very wise woman.  She did not entertain any sincere affection for the King, and, during all the years of his devotion to her, she never really loved him.  She found a monarch much sated with the luxurious pleasures of the Court, and beginning to tire of his latest mistress, and she saw in the situation an opportunity that appealed to her ambition.  With shrewd judgment she measured the character of Madame de Montespan, and she forecast in her mind the inevitable downfall of the proud and arrogant favorite.  She was the very opposite in nature of Madame de Montespan.  Her self-possession, poise, skill and tact, virtue and piety made an irresistible appeal to the tired King.  That her piety was scarcely more than a cloak is betrayed by many of her own utterances.  “Nothing is more clever than irreproachable behavior,” she said at one time to close friends.  Her behavior was both irreproachable and clever, and it obtained for her