'I can't help being,' said the child, 'I have by me a lady who is sense itself.' 'Go and tell her,' replied the king, 'that you will give her this evening a hundred thousand francs for your sugar-plums.' The mother gets me into trouble with the king, the son makes my peace with him; I am never for two days together in the same situation, and I do not get accustomed to this sort of life, I who thought I could make myself used to anything." She often spoke of leaving the court.

"As I tell you everything honestly," she wrote in 1675 to her confessor, Abbe Gobelin, "I will not tell you that it is to serve God that I should like to leave the place where I am; I believe that I might work out my salvation here and elsewhere, but I see nothing to forbid us from thinking of our repose, and withdrawing from a position that vexes us every moment.

I explained myself badly if you understood me to mean that I am thinking of being a nun; I am too old for a change of condition, and, according to the property I shall have, I shall look out for securing one full of tranquillity.

In the world, all reaction is towards God; in a convent, all reaction is towards the world; there is one great reason; that of age comes next." She did not, however, leave the court except to take to the waters the little Duke of Maine, who had become a cripple after a series of violent convulsions.

"Never was anything more agreeable than the surprise which Madame de Maintenon gave the king," writes Madame de Sdvigne to her daughter.