So strong was Louis in his new martial resolve that he actually refused Madame de Chateauroux permission to accompany him. France was delighted that at last her King had emancipated himself from petticoat influence, but the delight was short-lived, for before he had been many days in camp the Duchesse made her stately appearance, and saws and hammers were at work making a covered way between the house assigned to her and that occupied by the King. A fortnight later Ypres had fallen, and she was writing to Richelieu, "This is mighty pleasant news and gives me huge pleasure. I am overwhelmed with joy, to take Ypres in nine days. You can think of nothing more glorious, more flattering to the King; and his great-grandfather, great as he was, never did the like!" But grief was coming quickly on the heels of joy. The King was seized with a sudden and serious illness, after a banquet shared with his ally, the King of Prussia; and in a few days a malignant fever had brought him face to face with death. Madame de Chateauroux watched his sufferings with the eyes of despair. "Leaning over the pillow of the dying man, aghast and trembling, she fights for him with sickness and death, terror and remorse." With locked door she keeps her jealous watch by his bedside, allowing none to enter but Richelieu, the doctors, and nurses, whilst outside are gathered the Princes of the Blood and the great officers of the Court, clamouring for admittance. It was a grim environment for the death-bed of a King, this struggle for supremacy, in which a frail woman defied the powers of France for the monopoly of his last hours. And chief of all the terrors that assailed her was the dread of that climax to it all, when her lover would have to make his last confession, the price of his absolution being, as she well knew, a final severance from herself. Over this protracted and unseemly duel, in which blows were exchanged, entrance was forced, and Princes and ministers crowded indecently around the King's bed; over the Duchesse's tearful pleadings with the confessor to spare her the disgrace of dismissal, we must hasten to the crowning moment when Louis, feeling that he was dying, hastily summoned a confessor, who, a few moments later, flung open the door of the closet in which the Duchesse was waiting and weeping, and pronounced the fatal words, "The King commands you to leave his presence immediately." Then followed that secret flight to Paris, "amidst a torrent of maledictions," the Duchesse hiding herself from view as best she could, and at each town and village where horses were changed, slinking back and taking refuge in some by-road until she could resume her journey. Then it was that in her grief and despair she wrote to Richelieu, "Oh, my God! what a thing it all is! I give you my word, it is all over with me! One would need to be a poor fool to start it all over again."