A lettre de cachet, dated the day after the fête, consigned Fouquet to the fortress of Pignerol. Louise de la Vallière was enabled to soothe his Majesty's suspicions, with regard to the portrait, by assuring him that if his indignation had been aroused, her feelings had been much more grossly outraged.
CHAPTER XIX.
DEATH AND POISON.
"ANNE, daughter of Philip III., King of Spain, and Margaret of Austria, his wife, married to Louis XIII., King of France, surnamed the Just, mother of Louis XIV., surnamed Dieudonné, and of Philip of France, Duc d'Orléans, born September, 1601, died January, 1666."
These words stood at the head of a will which was signed "approved, Louis." Anne of Austria has stood before us from her fifteenth year until now; first, the golden-haired girl, next the prosecuted wife, then the stately regent, finally the devoted and conscientious mother. And now her time has come; she is dying at the Louvre. Her malady is a cancer in the breast, long concealed, now aggravated by the ignorance of quacks. Latterly it has become an open wound, the seat of intense suffering. Her daintily nurtured body and sensitive skin, which could not bear the touch of any but the finest and softest linen, the delicate habits of her daily life, her extreme refinement of mind and person (not common in those days even among princes), have come to this: "God punishes me in that body which I have too carefully tended," she said. But the Queen's mind had long been weaned from the world, her once lofty spirit schooled to the uses of adversity, and she bears her protracted sufferings with admirable meekness and resignation. Her face shrunken, drawn, and ashen, her frame bowed with intense pain rather than the weight of years, have lost all trace of their singular beauty; but the hands and arms are still white, plump, and shapely. To the last, her son Louis XIV. reverently kisses those taper fingers that had fondly entwined themselves among his clustering curls from boy to man. As long as that silvery voice could make itself heard, it was as a peacemaker and as a friend. When Maria Theresa, her niece, complained to her of the King's too apparent liaison with La Vallière, the dying Queen stroked her cheek, and comforted her, praying her to pardon the fire of youthful blood, and to remember that Louis, if erring, both loved and respected her. She reminded her, "that she [Maria Theresa] had at least a much happier lot than her own." Overcome by suffering during the long watches of the night, when she could not sleep, she weeps; as the tears roll down her wrinkled cheeks, Mademoiselle de Beauvais wipes them away with her handkerchief.
