Athenaïs bit her lip. Louise had at length discovered that her pretended friend was seeking to undermine her. On the previous evening the King had conversed for a long time with Madame de Montespan in the Queen's apartments. He had greatly enjoyed her clever mimicry of certain court personages; and when La Vallière had ventured to reproach him tenderly, he had replied—
"Louise, you are silly; your rose-tree speaks untruly when it calumniates me."
None but Athenaïs, to whom alone it had been confided, could have betrayed the secret. And now, at the entrance of her rival, la Vallière hastened to dry up her tears, but not so speedily as to prevent the other from perceiving them. Her feigned caresses, and ill-disguised tone of triumph, provoked Louise to let her see that she discerned her treachery. But Athenaïs pretended not to feel the shaft.
"Supplant you, dear Louise!" she said in a tone of surprise; "it would be difficult to do that, I should think, when the King is wholly devoted to you!"
Rising with a careless air, she approached the rose-tree, drew from her glove an almost invisible phial, and, with a rapid gesture, poured on its footstalk the corrosive liquid which the tiny flask contained.
This was the third time that Madame de Montespan had practised this unworthy manœuvre, unknown to the sorrowful favorite, who, as her insidious rival well knew, would believe the infidelity of the King, only on the testimony of his precious gift.
Next morning, Le Nôtre found the rose-tree quite dead. The poor old man loved it as if it had been his child, and his eyes were filled with tears as he carried it to its mistress.
Then Louise felt, indeed, that no hope remained. Pale and trembling, she took a pair of scissors, cut off the withered blossom, and placed it under a crystal vase. Afterwards she prayed to Heaven for strength to fulfil the resolution she had made.
The age of Louis the Fourteenth passed away, with its glory and with its crimes. France had now reached that disastrous epoch, when famine and pestilence mowed down the peaceful inhabitants, and Marlborough and Prince Eugene cut the royal army to pieces on the frontiers.
One day, the death-bell tolled from a convent tower in the Rue St. Jacques, and two long files of female Carmelites bore, to her last dwelling, one of the sisters of their strict and silent order. When the last offices were finished, and all the nuns had retired to their cells, an old man came and knelt beside the quiet grave. His trembling hand raised a crystal vase which had been placed on the stone; he took from beneath it a withered rose, which he pressed to his lips, and murmured, in a voice broken by sobs:—