it often stormy and sometimes calm; a picture of courts. I shall have no
difficulty in agreeing with you that it is of no use looking for
stability but in God. Certainly it cannot be found in the human heart,
for who was ever more sure than I was of the heart of the King of Spain?"

The king did not reply at all, and Madame de Maintenon but coldly,
begging the princess, however, to go to Versailles. There she passed but
a short time, and received notice to leave the kingdom. With great
difficulty she obtained an asylum at Rome, where she lived seven years
longer, preserving all her health, strength, mind, and easy grace until
she died, in 1722, at more than eighty-four years of age, in obscurity
and sadness, notwithstanding her opulence, but avenged of her Spanish
foes, Cardinals della Giudice and Alberoni, whom she met again at Rome,
disgraced and fugitive like herself. "I do not know where I may die,"
she wrote to Madame de Maintenon, at that time in retirement at St. Cyr.
Both had survived their power; the Princess des Ursins had not long since
wanted to secure for herself a dominion; Madame de Maintenon, more
far-sighted and more modest, had aspired to no more than repose in the
convent which she had founded and endowed. Discreet in her retirement as
well as in her life, she had not left to chance the selection of a place
where she might die.

[Illustration: Death of Madame de Maintenon.----34]




CHAPTER L----LOUIS XIV. AND DEATH. 1711-1715.

"One has no more luck at our age," Louis XIV. had said to his old friend