I am very glad that my letters have reached you at last. M. de Torey
is no friend of mine; if he could find occasion to do me harm he
would not let it escape him; but I do not trouble myself about that.
My son knows me well; he knows how sincere my attachment to him is,
and it would be difficult to make us quarrel. There is no use in
sealing letters with wax; they have a species of composition, made
of quicksilver and other substances, which lifts the wax, and when
the letters have been opened, read, and copied, they seal them up so
adroitly that no one can perceive that they have been opened. My son
knows how to manufacture that composition; they call it _gama_. The
Queen of Sicily once wrote and asked me if I no longer walked with the
king, as in her day. I answered with these lines:--
"Those happy days are gone; the face of all is changed
Since to these parts the gods have brought
The daughter of the Cretan king and Pasiphaë."
Torey took them to the _guenipe_, as if I meant her--which was true
enough; and the king was sulky with me for a long time about it.
The late king contracted a great many debts because he would not
retrench his luxury in anything; and that has been the cause of great
malversations on the part of business men and their partisans; for
when one sou had been lent to the king they turned it by agreement
with their creatures into a pistole. Thanks to their rascality, on
which no check was put, they have enriched themselves, but the king,
and now the country, have been impoverished. My son works night and
day, with no thanks from anybody, to bring things back to a good
condition. He has many enemies, who pour out against him all sorts of
horrid threats, and do all they can to rouse the hatred of the people
against him; in which they succeed easily, especially because he is
no bigot. He is so little self-interested that he has never touched
a farthing of what comes to him as regent, although he has great
needs because of his numerous children. The young king has around him
persons who are very ill-disposed towards my son,--one especially,
though he is his brother-in-law; but he is also the falsest of
hypocrites. He has an air as if he would eat the very images of
saints, but he is none the less the most wicked man on earth. In the
days of the late king when that man flattered any one and spoke to
him kindly it was taken as a proof that he had played him some evil
trick. He contributed to get his mother sent away from Court so as to
please the old woman, and he was so anxious to prevent her return to
Versailles that he ordered her furniture turned out of doors, as it
were. You can imagine what a man of that nature is capable of doing. I
fear him for my son as I do the devil; and I think that my son is not
sufficiently on his guard against him. The old woman wants his life;
all that they say of that diabolical woman is below the truth.
When my son reproached the Maintenon quite gently for slandering him,
and asked her to look into her conscience, where she knew that what
she said were falsehoods, she replied: "I spread that rumour because I
believed it."
My son said: "No, you could not have believed it, for you knew the
contrary."
Thereupon she answered insolently (and I admired the patience of my
son): "Did not the dauphine die?"
"Could she not have died without me?" asked my son, "was she immortal?"
The old woman replied: "I was in such despair at her loss that I
blamed the person who they told me had caused it."
My son said to her, "But, madame, you knew of the report that was
rendered to the king; you knew that I had done nothing, and that Mme.
la dauphine was not poisoned at all."
"That is true," she replied, "I will say no more about it."
That humpback Fagon, the favourite of the old _guenipe_, used to say
that what displeased him in Christianity was that he could not raise a
temple to the Maintenon and an altar for her worship.