From Louvois to M. de Chauvelin, Intendant, December 16, 1682, announcing the arrival of one of these convoys:
Above all, please take care to prevent any of these gentlemen from proclaiming aloud, a thing which has already occurred, any of the absurd statements connected with Mme. de Montespan, which have been proved to be absolutely without foundation. Threaten a punishment so severe at the first utterance that they will not dare to breathe a word further.
This letter ended the connection of Mme. de Montespan with the affair of the "corrupters of morals" or the poisoners. She was saved, but was this due to proofs of innocence or to reasons of State, to the refusal of Louis to credit the testimony of an Abbé Guibourg or Lesage, or to the remnants of an old tenderness? The few men with whom it had been necessary to share the secrets which would respond to these questions were so perfectly mute that contemporaries suspected nothing. They saw the ancient favourite a little neglected, but always dreaming of the possibility of reasserting herself, as the many pages of the Mémoires of Mademoiselle testify. All this was in the natural course of events.
One single indication of what Louis XIV. thought at the bottom of his soul is possessed; a letter from the King to Colbert, who knew all. Mademoiselle had prayed Mme. de Montespan to solicit some favour for Lauzun. The King charged Colbert to reply for him (October, 1681): "You will politely explain to her that I always receive the marks of her friendship and confidence with pleasure, and that I am very vexed when it is not possible to do what she desires, but at this time I can do no more than I have already done."[295] Did he believe the mistress innocent or had he pardoned her?
The first preoccupation of Lauzun, in returning to the world, must have been to make clear to himself through legitimate or illegitimate means the chronology of the King's love affairs, a history so essential for the comprehension of the interior life of the Court.
The main facts for this record have been already given in the preceding chapter. The returned prisoner had afterwards to learn all that Mademoiselle had accomplished for him during his captivity, and of what the public thought of her efforts, and he recognised that no one in France except Segrais doubted the fact of their marriage. That the marriage had taken place before his imprisonment was the prevalent belief, which was never really shaken. It again came to light in the eighteenth century. The historian Anquetil saw at Tréport, in 1744, an old person of more than seventy years of age, who resembled the portraits of the Grande Mademoiselle and did not know from whence came her pension.[296] This person believed herself to be the daughter of the Duchesse de Montpensier, and local tradition confirmed this conviction. There were, however, no absolute proofs, and it will be seen further on how this question of the marriage with Lauzun is brought up over and over again in the biography of the Grande Mademoiselle, with a monotony slightly fatiguing and without it being possible to ever obtain a clear response.
Whatever the fact may be, the Princess gave a very fine example of constancy and fidelity. She lived for ten years absorbed in a single thought. The Mémoires for the year 1673 say: "I remember nothing which has taken place during the past winter. My grief occupies me so much that I have but little interest in the actions of others." To liberate Lauzun had become a fixed idea, and she attached herself to the steps of the King and to those of Mme. de Montespan, without permitting herself to remember the ill that they had committed, as it was they alone who could loosen the bonds. The more they showed themselves inexorable, the more Mademoiselle redoubled her assiduities. In 1676 she enjoyed for the brief space of two hours the delusion that Louis XIV. at length, at the end of ten years, was moved with a feeling of compassion. The news of the attempted escape of Lauzun had just been received. "I learned that the King had listened to the account with some sign of humanity, I can hardly say of pity. If he had felt this, would he [Lauzun] still be there?"
The Princess wrote to the King, but received no response; and again four years rolled by. Mme. de Montespan was no longer favourite. The courtiers considered it shrewd to neglect her. Better inspired, Mademoiselle continued to stand fast by her, and the result proved the wisdom of this course, in the dramatic moment, for Louis, of the affair of the corrupters. It was in the spring of 1680, while denunciations were falling upon the fallen favourite as upon all those connected with La Voisin, that Mademoiselle remarked by certain movements and a change of tone that something was stirring between Mme. de Montespan and the fortress of Pignerol:
I went to her daily and she appeared touched by the thought of M. de Lauzun.... She often said to me: "But think how you can make yourself agreeable to the King, that he may accord to you what you desire so dearly." She threw out such suggestions from time to time, which advised me that they were thinking of my fortune.
The phrase of a friend came back to her: "But you should let them hope that you will make M. de Maine your heir." She recalled other hints which at first had passed unnoticed, and understood that a bargain was offered.