Madame consequently departed, accompanied by a brilliant suite which included the Comte and Comtesse de Gramont and Anthony Hamilton. Charles and his whole Court went to Dover to meet her, and in his eagerness to see his sister again the King, like an impatient schoolboy, rowed out into the Channel to welcome her. The business transacted during this brief visit need not detain us here. On the ability she showed in negotiating the "Traité de Madame" her fame chiefly rests. When the articles of this treaty were made public she was censured as a traitress who had sold her country to France, and English historians generally have ever since accused her of an utter lack of principle. But considering that she was, in spite of her birth, far more French than English, the obloquy that attaches to her name seems to us to have been inspired more by a prejudice against the whole House of Stuart than by a love of fairness. At the time, however, her reception in England was not only brilliant but cordial, and proved that her popularity had not waned since her last visit. The ten or twelve days she passed at Dover were, perhaps, the brightest of her life. Certainly she never knew a happy day afterwards.
Whether she was as successful in the personal as she was in the political object of her mission is not known. All accounts on the subject are at variance; some declare that she came back from Dover radiant, others depressed. At any rate, the reception she met with from her husband was well calculated to damp the gayest spirits. Monsieur began at once to reproach her in regard to the Chevalier de Lorraine; "he told her plainly that he knew his favourite's banishment was her doing, that she should have no peace till she had him recalled, and even threatened her with worse if she did not comply with his wishes." As the recall of the Chevalier meant her humiliation, she refused to yield. The relations between them were at their worst when one morning, three weeks after her arrival at St. Cloud, as she finished drinking a glass of chicory-water she was seized with violent intestinal pains.
Her first exclamation was that she was poisoned. Every one in the palace was terrified, except Monsieur. He did not appear in the least put out. Word was despatched to Louis at Versailles, who immediately sent Vallot, his own physician, to St. Cloud. Shortly after he followed himself, accompanied by the Queen and La Grande Mademoiselle. When they arrived they were told, to their horror, that Madame was dying. They found her writhing on a couch, pale, dishevelled, and scarcely recognisable from the convulsive movements that distorted her features. No one, with the exception of her maids of honour who hung over her weeping, appeared the least alarmed. At the sight of the King she uttered a piercing cry and said she felt "a fire in her stomach." The doctors looked on in silence, without attempting to alleviate her sufferings.
"But," said Louis to them, "is it possible you will let a woman die like this without doing something?"
Vallot replied that the illness was not fatal. "It is," he explained, "a sort of colic which may last nine, ten, or even twenty-four hours at the most."
And people continued to go and come in the room, laugh and talk with an inhuman indifference that must have been heart-rending to the unhappy woman.
La Grande Mademoiselle was astonished that no one had thought of speaking to her of the state of her soul.
"At this moment," she writes, "Monsieur entered. I said to him, 'Madame is not in a fit state to die, and she should be confessed.'
"He answered that I was right, and told me that her confessor was a Capuchin who was good for nothing except to do her honour by appearing in public in her coach that people might see she had one.
"'A different sort of man,' he added, 'is needed to speak to her about death. Whom could we get that would sound well to put in the Gazette?'