"'My friend,' said he, surveying him from head to foot, 'listen well to me. If you confess all and tell me the truth about what I want to know from you, whatever you may have done I pardon you; it shall never be mentioned again. But beware how you disguise the least thing, for if you do you are a dead man before you leave this place. Has not Madame been poisoned?'
"'Yes, Sire,' answered Morel.
"'And who has poisoned her and how?' said the King.
"He replied that it was the Chevalier de Lorraine, who had sent the poison from Italy to Beuvron and Effiat (two of Monsieur's equerries). Whereupon the King, redoubling his assurances of favour and threats of death, said—
"'And my brother, did he know of it?'
"'No, Sire. None of us three were fools enough to tell him. He never keeps a secret, he would have ruined us.'
"At this reply, the King uttered a long 'Ah!' like a man oppressed, who all at once breathes again.
"'Well,' said he, 'that is all I want to know.' And Brissac restored Morel to liberty."
Saint-Simon further declares that a few days before Monsieur married his second wife Louis took her aside and told her these circumstances, assuring her that Monsieur was innocent of any participation in this crime, and that were he not convinced of it he would not have permitted his remarriage. This second Madame, or La Palatine, as she was called, who by this marriage became the mother of the Regent d'Orléans, and was not the least original of the many strikingly original persons of "le grand siècle," tells the story in another fashion, in that remarkable correspondence of hers from which as much historical ore has been mined as from Saint-Simon's memoirs:—