Threatened with the question, it was not applied; since she said at last that she would confess everything, and an appalling confession it was. Repeatedly she had tried to poison her father, brother and several others, before she succeeded; and all under the appearance of the greatest love and confidence. Finally, Madame de Sévigné writes—
“At length all is over—la Brinvilliers is in the air; after her execution, her poor little body was thrown into a great fire, and her ashes dispersed by the wind. And so we have seen the end of a sinner. Her confessor says she is a saint!!”
After the death of Queen Maria Théresa, which occurred some little time before the fall of Madame de Montespan, the ascendency of the royal governess increased rapidly.
Madame Arnoul was now no longer the indispensable friend of Madame Scarron. She had come, in fact, to be so nearly an encumbrance, that Françoise had handed her over in marriage to a gentleman of Marseilles, with a portion of twenty thousand crowns, after having profited so excellently by the example of the intriguing skill of that past-mistress in the art, that she was quite capable henceforth of acting for herself.
Madame Scarron was not slow to mark the preponderating affection of Louis for his illegitimate children over the children of the queen, and that to secure His Majesty’s favour and goodwill, was to work to advance their interests by every possible means. She therefore took at its turn the tide of the ill-starred fortunes of Mademoiselle Montpensier’s connection with de Lauzun, to win from her the duchy of Aumâle, the earldom of Eu, and the principality of Dombes, wherewith to endow the children, as the price paid for obtaining from Louis the pardon and release of de Lauzun, from Pignerol. Then came the turn of Lauzun to extract from Mademoiselle, for himself, the duchy of Saint Fargeau, the barony of Thiers in Auvergne, also a huge income from the salt-tax in Languedoc. That done, de Lauzun showed himself for the base ungrateful creature he was. That before his incarceration at Pignerol a secret marriage had been made between them, had always been the supposition; since otherwise she would not, it was thought, have tolerated his treatment of her now, nor all the insults his fertile imagination devised for heaping on her. One day, in the presence of others, he had the cruelty to find fault with her style of dress as entirely out of keeping with her age. Another time he accused her of being the cause of all his sufferings at Pignerol. No money, he declared, would ever make up for it. He was for ever extorting from her money or jewels, which he lost at cards. Then he strove to obtain from her the sole command and control of all she still possessed; but the worm will turn, and Mademoiselle refused. This enraged him to a pitch that spared her no insults, and his finishing touch was to stretch out his foot one day when he visited her at Choisy, and desire her to pull off his boots. Mademoiselle turned scornfully away, and in a little while sought consolation and refuge from these indignities in religious exercises of the most rigid kind.
Mademoiselle de la Vallière, another broken-hearted woman, also about this time entered into the convent of the Carmelites. She took the veil, and passed the rest of her days a veritable saint under the name of “Sister Louise de la Miséricorde.”
Madame de Montespan, finding all attempts to regain the old empire over Louis in vain, subsequently made some endeavour to live a more creditable life.
And meanwhile the star of Françoise rose higher and higher in the royal firmament. The flickering meteor known as Mademoiselle de Fontanges hardly ruffled her placidity. To Ninon, Françoise merely referred to her as a proof that the intimacy in which she herself lived with the king, was no more than one of pure warm friendship, and had never exceeded those limitations.
As for la Fontanges, she is best known to posterity by the extraordinary head-dress she adopted. Ugly as it was, it remained in fashion for half a score of years. It was a structural arrangement of eight divisions, in wire, covered with pieces of muslin, bows of ribbon, interlaced with curls. These divisions were severally called: la Duchesse, le Solitaire, le Chou, le Mousquetaire, le Croissant, le Firmament, le Septième Ciel, and la Souris. (The Duchess, the Solitary, the Cabbage, the Musketeer, the Crescent, the Firmament, the Seventh Heaven and the Mouse.)
The king now bought for Madame Scarron the château and estate of Maintenon, in Brittany, on the banks of the Gave near Chartres, and by his desire she was henceforth called “Madame de Maintenon.” Perhaps hardly so much at his desire, there were some about who made a slight change in the orthography of the last syllable, and called her “Madame de Maintenant.”