Court life, nevertheless, pursued its monotonous course, and Mme. de Montespan continued to figure in positions of honour. In March, 1689, she goes to meet the Dauphin[293] with the rest of the Court, and it is she who has charge of the choice and arrangement of the wedding presents, "being the woman in the world," wrote Mademoiselle, "who knows the best forms." In July, the King led her to Versailles with her sister, Mme. de Thianges, and her niece, the beautiful Duchesse de Nevers. This lady the mother and aunt were cynically offering to the Monarch.[294] In February, 1681, "a lottery was opened at Mme. de Montespan's, of which the largest prize was one hundred thousand francs, and there were a hundred others offered of one hundred pistoles each." In July, 1682, the _Chambre ardente_ was suddenly suppressed. Of the three hundred accused, thirty-six people of no importance had been executed, one hundred sent to the galleys, or to prisons, or convents, or exiled; the noted among them always gaining some concessions. The dungeons of Paris and Vincennes were crowded. The smaller fry were released, and the remainder were scattered, without any other trial, through the provincial prisons, to await a death rarely slow in coming to relieve their misery. From Louvois to M. de Chauvelin, Intendant, December 16, 1682, announcing the arrival of one of these convoys: Above all, please take care to prevent any of these gentlemen from proclaiming aloud, a thing which has already occurred, any of the absurd statements connected with Mme. de Montespan, which have been proved to be absolutely without foundation. Threaten a punishment so severe at the first utterance that they will not dare to breathe a word further. This letter ended the connection of Mme. de Montespan with the affair of the "corrupters of morals" or the poisoners. She was saved, but was this due to proofs of innocence or to reasons of State, to the refusal of Louis to credit the testimony of an Abbe Guibourg or Lesage, or to the remnants of an old tenderness? The few men with whom it had been necessary to share the secrets which would respond to these questions were so perfectly mute that contemporaries suspected nothing. They saw the ancient favourite a little neglected, but always dreaming of the possibility of reasserting herself, as the many pages of the _Memoires_ of Mademoiselle testify. All this was in the natural course of events.