They carried her to the nearest bedchamber, and laying her down, loosened her clothes, and administered all the usual restoratives; but in vain. Already her face and limbs were livid and distorted. “I am poisoned—I have drunk poison!” was all she was able to utter.
The king came hurrying to the bedside, followed by his physicians, whom he had hastily summoned. They examined the agonised woman, grew themselves pale with dismay, and remained silent.
“Where are your senses?” demanded the king, in an access of distressful alarm. “It is frightful to let a woman die like this, and not be able to afford any help.”
The doctors only looked at each other, and still did not utter a word.
Madame herself entreated for an emetic, but Monsieur Valet, physician-in-chief, declared that it would be dangerous. She had been seized, he said, with the miserere—the term generally then used for cholera morbus.
Against these silent impotent healers of the body, the physician of the soul was sent for. He came. It was Monsieur l’Abbé Bossuet, and amid his pious, gentle consolations Madame passed away. It was also Bossuet who pronounced the funeral oration a day or two later.
“Madame is dead!—Madame is dead!” So the terrible words rang forth in the presence of the king and the assembled half-stunned courtiers.
That Madame was universally beloved had an exception to its ruling. He who should have best loved her, the duke himself, was indifferent to her. Scandal, busy with his name, said worse—said so much that was shameful, that it is not to be repeated here. It said so much, that the king, who was aware of it, had already ordered the immediate departure of the chevalier de Lorraine from Paris, a dismissal that was to be final. This minion of the duke had been furious at the command, and accused Madame as the cause of it, and she had simply laughed at the accusation. The day following her death, the chevalier de Lorraine, it was asserted, was seen, wrapped in a long riding-cloak, and his face concealed by a hat whose broad brims were drawn down low over his brows, riding hastily by the path of the gate of St Cloud, and so by the roads to the frontier. He was known to be a great friend of Monsieur de Luxembourg, and at a later day more than suspicion implicated Monsieur de Luxembourg in the most notorious poison cause celébre of its century.
The Court of Louis XIV. was now one vast spider’s-web of intrigue, woven from the lust and greed of so many of those surrounding him. It was the Nemesis of his policy of drawing all the nobility and provincial seigneurs from far and near to Versailles. If these were not lured into the brilliance of the Sun-King’s presence, and desired to live on their estates, it was next to an impossibility to do so, under fear of being suspected of plotting against the throne. They were required to group themselves all round the great orb, gathering from it the lustre beyond which all was obscurity, and this rarely enough to be done, even in Paris, but only at Versailles. Louis did not love the Louvre. He had never forgotten that in the days of the Fronde he had been driven thence to find refuge where it could be had.