When the storm of his grief at last began to abate, the King retired to his remote country-seat of Saint Leger, carrying his broken heart with him--and also Madame de Mailly, as sharer of his sorrow; for it was to the woman whom he had so lightly discarded that he first turned for solace. At Saint Leger he passed his days in reading and re-reading the two thousand letters the dead Comtesse had written to him, sprinkling their perfumed pages with his tears. And when he was not thus burying himself in the past, he was a prey to the terrors that had obsessed his childhood--the fear of death and of hell. At supper--the only meal which he shared with others, he refused to touch meat, "in order that he might not commit sin on every side"; if a light word was spoken he would rebuke the speaker by talk of death and judgment; and if his eyes met those of Madame de Mailly, he burst into tears and was led sobbing from the room. The communion of grief gradually awoke in him his old affection for Madame de Mailly; and for a time it seemed not unlikely that she might regain her lost supremacy. But the discarded mistress had many enemies at Court, who were by no means willing to see her re-established in favour--the chief of them, the Duc de Richelieu, the handsomest man and the "hero" of more scandalous amours than any other in France--a man, moreover, of crafty brain, who had already acquired an ascendancy over the King's mind. With Madame de Tencin, a woman as scheming and with as evil a reputation as himself, for chief ally, the Due determined to find another mistress who should finally oust Madame de Mailly from Louis' favour; and her he found in a woman, devoted to himself and his interests, and of such surpassing loveliness that, when the King first saw her at Petit Bourg, he exclaimed, "Heavens! how beautiful she is!" Such was the involuntary tribute Louis paid at first sight to the charms of Madame de la Tournelle, who was now fated to take the place of her dead sister, Madame de Vintimille, just as the Comtesse had supplanted another sister, Madame de Mailly. CHAPTER XXVI THE RIVAL SISTERS--_continued_ Louis XV.'s involuntary exclamation when he first set eyes on the loveliness of Madame de la Tournelle, "Heavens! how beautiful she is!" becomes intelligible when we look on Nattier's picture of this fairest of the de Nesle sisters in his "Allegory of the Daybreak," and read the contemporary descriptions of her charms.