"I asked her in English if she believed herself poisoned. Some confessor standing near catching the word poison, which is the same in French as in English, quickly interposed—
"'Madame, you must accuse nobody, but offer up your life as a sacrifice to God.'
"So she only shrugged her shoulders."
Perhaps the most touching incident of this leave-taking was associated with Tréville. This man was the Captain of Monsieur's Mousquetaires, and one of the wittiest and best-educated men at Court. "To talk like Tréville, to be as learned as Tréville, was the highest compliment you could pay a man." He was one of the chiefs of the Port-Royal coterie, which was the centre of intellectual life in France—and he loved Madame. It was a love that did them both honour—a chivalrous devotion that never overstepped the bounds of respect. To approach Madame at such a moment and take leave of her for ever before the envious eyes of that crowded, callous room was impossible to Tréville. But, notwithstanding her hectic excitement and intense suffering, Madame observed him standing in the background.
"Adieu, Tréville, adieu, mon ami!" she waved.
The simple farewell broke his heart. The next day he left the Court and the world for ever.
In these last terrible moments she forgot no one. Monsieur having left the room, she sent to call him back, and in bidding him farewell declared that "she had never been faithless to him." The solemnity of the occasion on which these words were uttered has inclined most of her biographers to acquit her of the adulteries with Louis and the Comte de Guiche of which she was suspected. There are other evidences, however, of Madame's virtue which might be cited quite as convincing as this; and in regard to the Comte de Guiche at all events, the various ladies for whom he sighed before he met Madame were all agreed in attributing a physical rather than a spiritual cause to the "Platonic" character of his amours.
Her strength now began to fail fast, and as a last resort the doctors decided to bleed her. The incision was made in her foot, but no blood flowed, and her exhaustion was so extreme that they thought she would die while her foot was still in the warm water. The doctors then declared that they would try one more remedy, but she begged them to give her the Extreme Unction before it was too late. It was given to her by a priest who was present, and who exhorted and rebuked her like a Scotch Calvinist. When he had finished she said meekly—
"At what o'clock did Jesus Christ die? At three o'clock?"
"Do not mind that, Madame," he replied, "you must endure life and wait for death with patience."