Nor did she curtail his pleasures. She merely gave them a saner direction. Orgies and midnight revelry became things of the past, but their place was taken by delightful days spent at the Château of Choisy, that regal little pleasure-house between the waters of the Seine and the Forest of Sénart, with all its marvels of costly and artistic furnishing. Here one entertainment succeeded another, from the hunting which opened, to the card-games which closed the day. A time of innocent delights which came sweet to the jaded palate of the King. Thus the halcyon months passed, until, one August day in 1741, the Comtesse was seized with a slight fever; Louis, consumed by anxiety, spending the anxious hours by her bedside or pacing the corridor outside. Two days later he was stooping to kiss an infant presented to him on a cushion of cramoisi velvet. His happiness was crowned at last, and life spread before him a prospect of many such years. But tragedy was already brooding over this scene of pleasure, although none, least of all the King, seemed to see the shadow of her wings. One early day in December, Madame de Vintimille was seized with a severe illness, as sudden as it was mysterious. Physicians were hastily summoned from Paris, only, to Louis' despair, to declare that they could do nothing to save the life of the Comtesse. "Tortured by excruciating pain," says de Goncourt, "struggling against a death which was full of terror, and which seemed to point to the violence of poison, the dying woman sent for a confessor. She died almost instantly in his arms before the Sacraments could be administered. And as the confessor, charged with the dead woman's last penitent message to her sister, entered Madame de Mailly's _salon_, he dropped dead." Here, indeed, was tragedy in its most sudden and terrible form! The King was stunned, incredulous. He refused to believe that the woman he had so lately clasped in his arms, so warm, so full of life, was dead. And when at last the truth broke on him with crushing force, he was as a man distraught. "He shut himself up in his room, and listened half-dead to a Mass from his bed." He would not allow any but the priest to come near him; he repulsed all efforts at consolation. And whilst Louis was thus alone with his demented grief, "thrust away in a stable of the palace, lay the body of the dead woman, which had been kept for a cast to be taken; that distorted countenance, that mouth which had breathed out its soul in a convulsion, so that the efforts of two men were required to close it for moulding, the already decomposing remains of Madame de Vintimille served as a plaything and a laughing-stock to the children and lackeys."