"Never," said Rochester, "was any one so regretted since dying was the fashion."
But for the good sense of the King, England would have declared war on France. Louis, whose grief was genuine, did all that he could to prove his regret—all but punish the suspected poisoners. On the contrary, Effiat was promoted and the Chevalier de Lorraine, whom he detested, to Monsieur's and his own delight, was recalled. Perhaps no other course was left open to him, if the report of foul play which threatened to plunge him into a war was not to be hushed up at all costs. But to prove to Charles II. and Europe that he was free from implication in this strange death, he at once ordered a post-mortem, at which English doctors and the English Ambassador were present. The verdict of the autopsy was "death from natural causes." It served to allay popular anger but not popular suspicion.
Louis also gave Madame such a funeral as few kings have ever had.
"I do not think," wrote Madame de Sévigné, who was present, "that there will be any better music in heaven."
Bossuet pronounced over the corpse his masterpiece, which is familiar to every schoolboy in France. On his finger, placed there by Louis himself, there glittered the emerald Madame had bequeathed him with her dying breath, and which he wore till his own death. The body was buried at St. Denis beside that of Henrietta Maria. It was the first that the mob dug up one hundred and twenty-three years later when the tombs of the kings were desecrated. It was flung into a pit behind the church along with Louis' and the rest of his dynasty's. By a curious coincidence it—or what was supposed to be it—was the first body restored to its original resting-place after Waterloo.
By a still more curious coincidence, Madame's daughter, Marie Louise, whom they married to the last King of Spain, of the House of Austria, died at the same age and in the same strange way as her mother. There is something decidedly uncanny in the fate that decreed that Effiat, as French Ambassador at Madrid, should be the medium through whom her husband corresponded with her; that the Chevalier de Lorraine should be the man appointed to lead her to the altar; and that the Comtesse de Soissons should be the one to poison her!
If happiness be the aim of prince and peasant alike, it was not, at all events, in the Armida-courts of the seventeenth century that it was to be found. It was of Madame, his friend and patron, that Molière was thinking when his Alceste sang—
"Si le roi me donnait,
Paris sa grande ville,
Et qu'il me fallut quitter