Mademoiselle's suffering in this scene was heightened by the fact that a suppressed cough outside the door revealed to her the presence of an unseen witness. She rightly suspected it to be the Prince de Condé, and reproached the king with just indignation for subjecting her to such a humiliation.
His majesty bore her reproaches very patiently, and dismissed her with the assurance that further discussion would not alter his decision. "He embraced me and led me to the door, where I found I don't know whom. I went home as quickly as possible, and there je criai des hauts cris."
Lauzun, sure of his hold upon her royal highness, and fearing to lose ground with the king, yielded with admirable resignation to the royal decree. His favor at court seemed for awhile greater than ever; but suddenly, for reasons never made public, he was disgraced and sent to the Castle of Pignerol. Mademoiselle spent the ten years of his imprisonment in faithful efforts to procure his release, and purchased it finally by an immense donation to the Duke du Maine, a son of Madame de Montespan. It was a success bitterly to be deplored. Any one more odious than Lauzun after his release, it would be difficult to imagine. Peevish, grasping, slovenly, and ungrateful, he hung about Mademoiselle's establishment; using the power which a private marriage had undoubtedly given him with an insolence that turned her love to disgust.
The spirit of a courtier alone remained to recall the Lauzun of former days. When the princess announced to him the death of Marie Thérèse, he cried: "'People deserve to be imprisoned who spread such falsehoods; how dare they say such things of the queen?' . . . At last they showed him the letters, and he had to agree that queens are mortal like other people."
In 1684 Mademoiselle and Lauzun parted in mutual displeasure. She rejected his efforts at conciliation, and the last entry in her Mémoires is the following: "M. de Lauzun was living as usual in obscurity, but exciting notice, and often concerning matters which annoyed me. When I returned from Eu in 1688, my people were dressed in new liveries. One day, when I was walking in the park of——"
"Mademoiselle knew life late," says M. Sainte-Beuve; "but in the end she know it well, and passed through every stage of experience. She felt the slow suffering which wears out love in a heart, the contempt and indignation that crush it, and reached at last that indifference which finds no remedy or consolation except in God. It is a sad day when we find that the being whom we have loved to adorn with every perfection and load with every gift is so poor a thing. She had years to meditate upon this bitter discovery. She died in March, 1693, aged sixty-six years."
Lauzan, with characteristic insolence, appeared at the general in the mourning of a widowed husband. The king sent the Duke of Saint-Aignan to bid him withdraw. "At such a moment I cannot listen to the voice of pride," was the reply; "I am absorbed by my grief, and could wish to see the king more occupied with his own." He remained to the close of the ceremony.
The magnificent obsequies were interrupted by a more serious disturbance. An urn, in which part of the remains were carelessly embalmed, exploded with a tremendous noise, frightening all the assistants. It was said that not even death could come to Mademoiselle without some ludicrous circumstance.
This princess began life with advantages such as fall to the lot of few human beings. What did she leave behind her in the world? A hospital and seminary under the charge of Sisters of Charity; a very fair literary reputation, founded chiefly upon her Mémoires, which, though not elegant in style, are truthful, graphic, and clear; and a character without spot or blemish, in an age when such characters were rare. Her written confessions afford ample material for cutting criticism, but it would be an unkindly task to turn her own artillery upon herself.