herself to the task, finding it on many accounts congenial, and achieving a remarkable degree of success. There seems to have been in the complex character of the king, in spite of his many sins, no little regard for religion—it is said that he never missed going to mass but once in his life—and he was already weary of Montespan, whose influence on him was unquestionably evil. So the new influence more and more prevailed; the mistress was dismissed to a convent, and the wise, devout, good-looking governess became a power at court, first lady in waiting to the crown princess, and female friend to the monarch. The king spent hours daily in her company, and was the better for it. She was a strict moralist, and none of the slanders rife about her seem to have any good foundation. She enjoyed the respect of the best people about the court, and was a friend of the neglected queen, who cried, “Providence has raised up Madame de Maintenon to bring my husband back to me.” And this new favorite, who was not a mistress, believed abundantly in the divine nature of her mission. She accepted the king’s friendship to give him good counsels and end his slavery to vice. The care of his salvation became the first and most absorbing of her duties. She held herself a monitress, charged to encourage and console him, or to check him with reproaches that none but she dared utter. He called her “Your Seriousness.” She never annoyed him with opposition, never encroached, had no will of her own, but became, as it were, the king’s conception of his better self, his second conscience, a magnet quick to draw him, sometimes into the really worthier of two opposing courses, always into the more ecclesiastically virtuous. The queen died in her arms in 1683. Two years after, she was privately married to the king by the Archbishop of Paris in the presence of Père Lachaise, the king’s confessor, after whom the famous cemetery in Paris is named. Such was the woman who ruled at Versailles when Fénelon came into office. He excited her interest on their first meeting, at or before 1683; for she wrote, under that date, to Madame de St. Geran: “Your Abbé de Fénelon is very well received; but the world does not do him justice. He is feared; he wishes to be loved; and is lovable.”