Their astonishment was very much 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.