“This young person needs be quite extraordinary, since Madame de Montespan praises her, and praises her with so much vivacity.  However, we shall see.”

Two days afterwards, Mademoiselle de Fontanges was seen in the salon of the grand table.  The King, in spite of his composure, had looks and attentions for no one else.

This excessive preoccupation struck the Queen, who, marking the blandishments of the young coquette and the King’s response, guessed the whole future of this encounter; and in her heart was almost glad at it, seeing that my turn had come.

Mademoiselle de Fontanges, given to the King by her shameless family, feigned love and passion for the monarch, as though he had returned by enchantment to his twentieth year.

As for him, he too appeared to us to forget all dates.  I know that he was only now forty-one years old, and having been the finest man in the world, he could not but preserve agreeable vestiges of a once striking beauty.  But his young conquest had hardly entered on her eighteenth year, and this difference could not fail to be plain to the most inattentive, or most indulgent eyes.

The King, with a sort of anticipatory resignation, had for six or seven years greatly simplified his appearance.  We had seen him, little by little, reform that Spanish and chivalric costume with which he once embellished his first loves.  The flowing plumes no longer floated over his forehead, which had become pensive and quite serious.  The diagonal, scarf was suppressed, and the long boots, with gold and silver embroidery, were no longer seen.  To please his new divinity, the monarch suddenly enough rejuvenated his attire.  The most elegant stuffs became the substance of his garments; feathers reappeared.  He joined to them emeralds and diamonds.

Allegorical comedies, concerts on the waters recommenced.  Triumphant horse-races set the whole Court abob and in movement.  There was a fresh carousal; there was all that resembles the enthusiasms of youthful affection, and the deliriums of youth.  The youth alone was not there, at least in proportion, assortment, and similarity.

All that I was soliciting for twelve years, Mademoiselle de Fontanges had only to desire for a week.  She was created duchess at her debut; and the lozenge of her escutcheon was of a sudden adorned with a ducal coronet, and a peer’s mantle.

I did not deign to pay attention to this outrage; at least, I made a formal resolution never to say a single word on it.

The King came no less from time to time, to pay me a visit, and to talk to me, as of old, of operas and his hunting.  I endured his conversation with a philosophical phlegm.  He scarcely suspected the change in me.

At the chase, one day, his nymph, whom nothing could stop, had her knot of riband caught and held by a branch; the royal lover compelled the branch to restore the knot, and went and offered it to his Amazon.  Singular and sparkling, although lacking in intelligence, she carried herself this knot of riband to the top of her hair, and fixed it there with a long pin.