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THE BOOK ON THE TABLE

LOUISE DE LA VALLIERE was the daughter of an ancient, though scarcely noble house, with honourable traditions of military service, discharged from one generation to another by father and son. Her own father had taken part in many campaigns with distinction, but his efforts brought him little wealth, and he retired, after the birth of his daughter, to lead the life of a small country gentleman on his estate at Reugny, near Tours. It was from this little property that the family took the name of La Vallière, for the house stands on a gentle hill, and looks over two valleys, a small valley on one side, and on the other the larger valley of the Brenne. A few walls only of the ancient house remained, but within this shell the family of La Vallière had employed some architect, ́ se reposant des grands travaux de Chambord ou de Blois' to build them'un charmant pavillon,' ornamented with all the skill of the Renaissance. The windows looked down the slope to flat meadows, where the river circled between rows of tall poplars. There were soft hills all round, covered with woods and vineyards-a charming country indeed, in which a girl might grow up happy in the consciousness of her own beauty. There were painted chimney-pieces in the rooms also, which, with their gentle allegorical scenes—a group of ladies on the grass for instance, and Love hid behind a tree with his bow drawn-might charm her eye; and her father, no doubt, would translate for her the motto that was cut in the stone above. 6 Ad Principem ut ad Ignem Amor indissolutus.' 'Au Prince, comme au feu de l'autel, amour indissoluble.' Unhappily the father of Louise died when she was barely ten years old, and she had in future no one to teach her Latin, or to see to it that her translations were correct. Her mother from the first showed herself an indifferent parent, who married, when her husband had been dead scarcely a year, the Marquis de Saint-Remi, first Maître d'hôtel in the household of the Duke of Orleans. There were three young princesses for Louise to play with, who also were little controlled by their mother. Tenez vous droites, levez la tête,' was all the advice she had to give them when they came in to see

Louise de la Vallière, par J. Lair.

her. They read romances, romped about the castle of Blois, and wondered which of them should be Queen of France. When their father died the widow moved her household to Paris, the Saint-Remis and Louise going with her, and there, lodged in the Palace of the Luxembourg, they danced and they dreamed with greater zest than ever. The King indeed was married, but there were princes, their cousins, who hunted the woods with them, and Mademoiselle, their half-sister, with her band of violins to set them all dancing. They were gay and extremely young, for the King himself was but twenty-two, and boys and girls of sixteen and seventeen could marry and become at once people of importance. The knowledge that their play was played on the verge of that supreme stage where the king acted in the face of Europe lent it a tragic kind of brilliancy. One or two ladies already had stepped into the full light, and had disappeared again, without applause. The event which decided Louise's fate took place when she was but sixteen, in the spring of 1661. In that year the King's brother married the Princess Henrietta, daughter of Charles I. of England, and was endowed at the same time with some of the property of the late Duke of Orleans. The Dowager Duchess, therefore, in whose service the Saint-Remis still continued, was deprived of much of her power, and the future of her dependents seemed doubtful. At this crisis it appeared that Louise had already attracted the notice of an influential woman, Madame de Choisy, who was anxious to be in with the Court, but had neither youth nor beauty of her own to recommend her. With her competent eye she saw that Louise would do what she needed, and suggested that she should be given the post of maid-of-honour in the household of Madame Henriette, which was then being formed.

Madame Henriette was a girl of sixteen also, but, as years were counted at Court, a mature woman, in the flush of her beauty. Indeed, the transformation was surprising; she had been a thin, insignificant child; Louis himself had called her 'les os du cimetière des Innocents'; but the spring of 1661 revealed her suddenly as an exquisite young woman, frail and capricious, perhaps, but of an esprit vif, délicat, enjoué.' Louise and her family had good reason to congratulate themselves on the appointment; it was of substantial value, and the maid-of-honour to such a mistress would be in the highest places of the Court.

The summer of 1661 was known in after years for its splendour. June, in spite of some storms, was more lovely even than May; and

the Court was at Fontainebleau. To imagine what happened when the sun rose, on a cloudless summer morning, and promised brilliant hours till dusk, and then a warm summer night among the trees, one must conceive the untried vigour of men of twenty and of women of eighteen, set free from all constraint, and inspired by love and fine weather. They drove out to bathe in the morning and came back in the cool of the day on horseback; they wandered in the woods after dinner, at first to the sound of violins, which faded away as the couples drew further and further into the shadows, losing themselves till the dawn had risen. In all these delights Madame Henriette showed the gayest and most passionate. It was seen too that the King enjoyed them best by her side, and took pains to discover fresh ways of amusing her. There were spectacles, and ballets danced on horseback, at night, to the flare of torches. After a month the first check was felt; everyone was saying that they had for each other' cet agrément qui précède d'ordinaire les grandes passions,' and the king's wife and mother perceived it.

It was clear that the intrigue could not go on unless some cover could be found for it. The cover they contrived together was simple, and at the moment neither could see where the fatal danger would lie. Madame Henriette and the Queen had enough maids-ofhonour between them to tempt the King's taste. If he professed love to one of them jealousy would be diverted, and he could court his sister-in-law in peace. The plan was adopted. The friends of one girl sent her to Paris; another was quick enough to suspect; there remained the third, Louise de la Vallière, who had no friends and was simple enough to believe. Had she been profoundly astute and wildly ambitious she could have done no more. Neither the courtiers themselves nor observers of her own time ever credited her with much wit, or accused her of ambition. The epithets they apply to her are always soft and honourable; she was douce' and 'naïve,'' sincère,' and 'sage.' She was not even beautiful ; but the portraits and descriptions of her bring before us the image of a tall young woman, supple, her head curled with yellow ringlets; her eyes were blue, and had an expression of great sweetness; an honest look, moreover, simple and claiming nothing. Charm, they all repeat, was her genius-charm in youth that turned before her youth was over to a dignity that had something of melancholy in it. One imagines that she was very silent, and said nothing witty unless she stumbled into it; but her voice for commonplaces was of adouceur inexprimable.'

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The King had been used to a different kind of love; he had had the flattery of ambitious women, who offered a splendid return for the splendours he could bestow, and never lost consciousness of the bargain. To find himself in possession of an entirely simple and uncalculating affection was a new experience. At first it may have been even embarrassing. When Louise confessed, drawn on by false encouragement, that she loved him, the King tired of the plot, changed his view, and found himself enamoured. The true courtship began carefully, under disguises; but soon, in a fortnight indeed, the love was unconcealed. Madame Henriette had turned elsewhere, and the relationship between Louis and la Vallière was confessed.

It was the etiquette at Court that when the King approached all other suitors should withdraw, so that they had solitude when they wished it; but it was pleasant perhaps to come home late from some ride in the woods together, and hours of simple talk, to find their vows confirmed by the flattery of the Court who were waiting for them to act their parts as Shepherd and Shepherdess in one of Benserade's ballets. Louise, when she looked back, could claim that she had spent one happy month. The simplicity that had made her a dupe suffered her to keep a strange innocence all her life, as though she were conscious that the heart of her pleasure had been pure. But she woke by degrees to the fact that her state was no simple one of devotion given and received, but involved relationships with other people which were not happy and reflected harshly upon her passion. The Queen and the Queen-mother, clinging together in their virtuous solitude, had been able to ignore the King's pre-occupation. When he walked with Louise in the garden of an afternoon, followed by a troop of courtiers, they kept indoors with their eyes turned from the windows. But the lovers, growing insolent, triumphed one day over the most sensitive obstacle of all, and sat down to cards together in the Queen-mother's private rooms. Louise, when she became devout, confounded all her sins in one vast crime, needing a lifetime of penitence. Had she distinguished them she might have owned that it was at this season, in the autumn of 1664, that she sinned with the greatest consciousness of sin, and with the greatest confusion of feeling. She was at the height of her beauty, and courtiers who had sneered at her because she had neither rank nor wit were now obsequious. Still, she had but little to count upon, and if she exulted in her splendid moment it was largely because she knew it for a passing one, which she must relish to the

full, though half her joy were pain. Her happiness could be disturbed by looking in the glass and finding her face grown thin. People began to remark that she could not stand broad daylight, and then noticed that she had, after all, ' peu d'esprit.' But although she understood what this meant, and suffered acutely, she had a moment of faith in herself and in Louis. She respected their love. 'J'ai perdu presque tout ce qui peut plaire,' she told the King. Cependant, ne vous trompez pas, vous ne trouverez jamais ailleurs ce que vous trouvez en moi.' Brave words! In uttering them she seems to return once more to the innocence of the first months of all. The King protested, but the charms of Madame de Montespan were irresistible.

Louise had always kept one resource at the back of her mind, as though she distrusted her happiness; when the King deserted her she would take the veil. But the King found her useful to cover his fresh intrigue, and at the age of twenty-five it seemed best to edify the world by remaining at Court and making public her conversion. She tried to satisfy herself with scraps of philosophy and a pretence of learning, but what she read served only to disillusion her, and to convince her that peace was to be found in religion alone. At Court she owned to a friend she suffered comme une damnée.'

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It was not until 1674 that the King allowed her to enter the order of the Carmelites, after having inflicted upon her the most exquisite of punishments. A life where the mind was bent to servile tasks and the body chafed with sackcloth was peace in comparison. She lived to be a rheumatic old woman of sixty-five, whose passions, save for one' importunate memory,' were smoothed away as the expression of a marble face is smoothed by pious kisses; and such was her penitence that her body, when she was dead, was thought by the poor to have divinity enough to bless their offerings. At the time of the Revolution her bones were scattered with the royal bones. Sentiment would like to have it that their dust was mixed.

VIRGINIA STEPHEN.