greater, then, when the king, being obliged to keep his bed, sent for
them with orders to bring what they had newly written of history, and
they saw as they went in Madame de Maintenon sitting in an arm-chair near
the king's pillow, chatting familiarly with his Majesty. They were just
going to begin their reading, when Madame do Montespan, who had not been
expected, came in, and after a few compliments to the king, paid such
long ones to Madame de Maintenon, that the king, to stop them, told her
to sit down. 'As it would not be fair,' he added, 'to read without you a
work which you yourself ordered.' From this day, the two historians paid
their court to Madame de Maintenon as far as they knew how to do so."

The queen had died on the 30th of July, 1683, piously and gently, as she
had lived. "This is the first sorrow she ever caused me," said the king,
thus rendering homage in his superb and unconscious egotism, to the
patient virtue of the wife he had put to such cruel trials. Madame de
Maintenon was agitated but resolute. "Madame de Montespan has plunged
into the deepest devoutness," she wrote, two months after the queen's
death; "it is quite time she edified us; as for me, I no longer think of
retiring." Her strong common sense and her far-sighted ambition, far
more than her virtue, had secured her against rocks ahead; henceforth she
saw the goal, she was close upon it, she moved towards it with an even
step. The king still looked in upon Madame de Montespan of an evening
on his way to the gaming-table; he only staid an instant, to pass on to
Madame de Maintenon's; the latter had modestly refused to become lady in
attendance upon the dauphiness. She, however, accompanied the king on
all his expeditions, "sending him away always afflicted, but, never
disheartened." Madame de Montespan, piqued to see that the king no
longer thought of anybody but Madame de Maintenon, "said to him one day
at Marly," writes Dangeau, "that she has a favor to ask of him, which was
to let her have the duty of entertaining the second-carriage people and