shows at least that, whatever she may have lacked in chastity, was amply compensated in discretion.

Foiled in her designs on the Emperor, she devoted herself to the service of Louis. In 1675 she married a Roman widower, the Duke of Bracciano. The marriage was hardly successful : the duke was elderly, impoverished, parsimonious and irritating; and Mme. de Bracciano was glad to take protracted holidays in Paris, consolidating her position with Louis and imparting the news from Rome with the admirable zeal of a diplomatic spy. She was, however, in Rome with her husband when he died, twenty-three years after their marriage, and as he had by this time sold the duchy and title of Bracciano, she was henceforward known by his family name of Orsini in the Gallicised form of the Princesse des Ursins. She thus became a widow for the second time at the age of fifty-six; and it is at this point that the overture to the drama of her supremacy begins.

Charles II, King of Spain, was sickly, childless, and a halfwit, and the problem of the Spanish succession at his death was momentous. His wife, the Emperor's sister-in-law, favoured the Emperor's son, the Archduke Charles; the regent, who was none other than Mme. des Ursins' friend, Cardinal Porto-Carrero, supported the Duc d'Anjou, grandson of Louis XIV. To a dying man, even had he been in his senses, the cardinal's menace of hell-fire was a stronger argument than any the queen could employ, and so it happened that on his death-bed, Charles bequeathed the twenty-three crowns of the Spanish monarchy to his great-nephew, the Duc d'Anjou, who thus, in 1700, at the age of seventeen, became Philip V of Spain. The Archduke Charles protested, the Emperor declared war on France and Spain, and there began the War of the Spanish Succession, which was to devastate Europe for the next fourteen years.

Philip V was indolent, silent, flaccid and a victim to melancholia; he was also a victim to his temperament. As his greataunt, Madame, later observed: "Wenn er nur was im Bette hat, ist alles gut bei ihm," though, awkwardly enough, his religious scruples prevented him from seeking consolations outside the pale of matrimony. His accession was thus immediately followed by plans for his marriage, and the destined bride was the thirteenyear-old Marie Louise, daughter of the Duke of Savoy, and sister to the wife of Philip's elder brother, the Duc de Bourgogne.

This was Mme. des Ursins' opportunity, and she hastened to apply to Louis for his nomination of her to conduct the future Queen of Spain to her husband. Her eagerness to obtain this unimportant post shows clearly that she had some higher aim in view, and it was doubtless, as Miss Cruttwell points out, in her own brain and not in that of Louis XIV, that there germinated the idea that she should remain in Spain with the queen as camarera mayor. This position was no sinecure, for it entailed constant attendance on the queen, including the menial duties of dressing and undressing her, carving and waiting on her at meals, besides the regulation of her private expenses and the supervision of the three hundred duennas and ladies of the court. As widow of the Duke of Bracciano, Mme. des Ursins was a grandee of Spain, and therefore eligible for the post, but it was not to be expected that the appointment of a foreigner would be popular with the Spaniards, or that her path would be easy. It was, however, obvious that the tact and charm of Mme. des Ursins were exceptional and that her influence with the childqueen would be a valuable safeguard of French interests at the court of the feeble Philip. Thus, not only was she duly nominated as guide on the journey, but Louis privately pressed her to remain on in Madrid, and she set off joyfully to Villefranche, where she was to meet the young Queen of Spain.

Marie-Louise was the antithesis of her husband. Charming, vivacious, tactful, open-hearted, and with an intelligence far in advance of her years, she soon became the loyal friend of Mme. des Ursins, to whom she remained devoted throughout her life. The two joined Philip at Barcelona, and within a short time the queen had won the affection not only of her husband, but of all Catalonia. The guiding wisdom of the princesse and the queen's natural wit, formed a coalition stronger than Louis XIV had dared to hope, and when, after five months of marriage, Philip V left Barcelona to join his army in Italy, the child-queen was nominated regent, and Mme. des Ursins was officially appointed camarera mayor. They arrived in Madrid in June, 1702, and the princesse was not unnaturally apprehensive as to their reception. One of the French king's expressed charges to her was the task of relaxing the almost oriental rigidity of Spanish etiquette. The French fashions of hairdressing and costume in which the queen and princesse entered Madrid were a challenge to the ladies of the

court, many of whom considered that they had a far better right than any Frenchwoman to the position of camarera mayor. Further, there was an important party in favour of the Archduke Charles, headed by the widowed queen in exile, at Toledo, and finally Mme. des Ursins knew that she would have to reckon with the enmity of her old friend Porto-Carrero, whom she not unjustifiably intended to treat as a senile cipher. However, the tact which had led her while still at Barcelona to depose all the highly-placed French officials in favour of Spaniards enabled her to triumph over all her difficulties, while the young queen's personal charm and amazing political aptitude soon won all hearts to her side.

Philip's sojourn in Italy began inauspiciously enough with a prolonged attack of what he euphemistically described as “les vapeurs," and whose obvious cause was his physical separation from his wife, followed by a quarrel with his father-in-law, the Duke of Savoy. When he eventually joined his army, he was happier, for bodily courage proved to be one of his few virtues, and his presence at two victories secured his return after only nine months' absence. Unfortunately for Mme. des Ursins he did not return alone: he brought with him a new ambassador from France to the Spanish court, Cardinal d'Estrées. The cardinal had been Mme. des Ursins' friend in Rome, but in Madrid he preferred to consider himself as her rival, and although he started by treating her enemy, Porto-Carrero, as a nonentity, he had no intention of becoming the princesse's ally. With him came his nephew, the Abbé d'Estrées, and the pair inaugurated their arrival by slighting Mme. des Ursins on every possible occasion, and by writing to Louis that she was attempting to govern the kingdom to her own aggrandisement. She retaliated by resigning her post, and Louis accepted her resignation, according her the grace of going to Versailles to account for her stewardship before finally retiring to Rome. Her resignation was probably sincere enough, but when a few weeks later she was told that she must go straight to Rome without the opportunity of explaining her position to Louis XIV, she compelled not only the queen but the feeble Philip to write to Louis in her defence. The result was that, a week later, a letter came from Versailles commanding Philip to retain her in Madrid, on condition of an official reconciliation between her and the d'Estrées.

As might have been expected, the reconciliation was the merest farce; but within a few months the princesse succeeded in securing the retirement of the cardinal. His nephew remained behind as ambassador, and at this point Mme. des Ursins made the mistake which she was to repeat later-of entering into alliance with a secret enemy. The Abbé d'Estrées, by pretending friendship, persuaded her to countersign one of his most important official despatches to Versailles, which in itself was enough to justify his uncle's accusations as to her attempted assumption of a dictatorship at Madrid. But even before the merited reproof from Louis arrived, Mme. des Ursins began to realize that she was, perhaps, being imprudent, and she persuaded Philip to authorize the breaking open of the diplomatic bag to Versailles, so that she could see what the Abbé really thought about her. The result was as little complimentary as her ensuing action was tactful, for she copied the Abbé's letter and sent it annotated to her brother in Paris, asking him to show it to the minister for foreign affairs. This time her resignation was demanded.

Saint-Simon's version of the episode of the annotated letter is worth quoting, for its extreme picturesqueness, even though Miss Cruttwell may be right in impugning its veracity. According to him, d'Aubigny, who had been the princesse's secretary for twenty years, had long been her lover, and one day the Abbé, enraged at d'Aubigny's participation in councils of State, from which he himself was excluded, wrote to Louis, accusing Mme. des Ursins of treachery and peculation, and adding that d'Aubigny's influence was such that it was popularly supposed that he and the princesse were husband and wife. Mme. des Ursins intercepted the letter, scrawled across it the words "Pour mariés, non!" and sent it off unsealed to Louis, enclosed in another from herself, vituperating the Abbé. She thus admitted herself guilty of tampering with the royal correspondence, and while ignoring the graver charges, and even the implication that she had been d'Aubigny's mistress, concentrated only on the supreme insult, that she could be supposed capable of actually marrying her secretary.

Whatever the truth of this story, the princesse was recalled in March, 1704; but the Abbé did not remain to triumph, for he was recalled at the same time. It is significant that Louis waited until Philip had left Madrid on a short visit to his army,

before ordering the princesse to leave Spain, for the queen, in her fury, would have been capable of persuading him to the most serious act of defiance, and she had only to refuse Philip admittance to her bed to bring him instantly to heel. The princesse, with her customary diplomacy, left Madrid at once, as she had been told to do; but she was determined not to retire into private life without an opportunity of pleading her cause at Versailles. At first, permission was refused, but after some months it was granted; and in January, 1705, Mme. des Ursins returned to Paris. There is no doubt that the queen was directly responsible for this, and it is remarkable that a girl of sixteen should have had the temerity to defy Louis, and the acute success of forcing him to eat his words.

Mme. des Ursins' visit to Paris was an unqualified triumph. Everyone flocked to see her, and at Versailles she received the highest marks of favour from Louis himself. Her return to Madrid was decided, and she employed some weeks in discussing the situation in detail with Louis and with Mme. de Maintenon. Mme. de Maintenon was at this time seventy years old, and had been Louis' unacknowledged wife for twenty years. Before this year she does not seem to have been in any close touch with Mme. des Ursins, although she had actually been responsible for recommending her appointment as conductress of Marie-Louise. Saint-Simon, it is true, says that Mme. de Maintenon was jealous of the possible effect of her charms upon Louis, and that the same reason was responsible for her now being sent back to Spain; but the interest of this story is less in its hypothetical revelation of one of Mme. des Ursins' unsatisfied ambitions, than in its extraordinary tribute to the seduction of her charms, at an age when most women have ceased even to desire so signal a triumph as the favours of a monarch. In any case, during this visit the intimacy between Mme. de Maintenon and the princesse was constant and cordial, and it was arranged that their correspondence in the future was to be just as intimate and just as constant. If it was fated to diminish in cordiality, this was the fault, not of either correspondent, but of the circumstances of the Spanish War.

It is unnecessary, for our purpose, to examine in detail the ramifications of this campaign, in which by this time practically every country in Europe was arrayed in battle against the two