“I should be sorry,” said Louis, crossing with dignified steps to the open window, and throwing his cane out of it, “to have struck a man of rank”; but the next morning Lauzun was lodged in the Bastille. Only for a short time however. Louis, in a sense, had broken his word; but Lauzun, on his part, had violated conditions, and the young man was forgiven, and by way of indemnity was offered the captaincy of the Royal Guards, which he at first insolently refused, and only accepted under entreaty. It was after his release from the Bastille that this most Gascon of Gascon gentlemen became the object of the Grande Mademoiselle’s ardent admiration. At first it was he who coquetted, affecting not to understand, observing only the airs of profoundest respect, just touched with melancholy, and permitting himself a very occasional sigh. Then one day Mademoiselle murmured to the handsome dragoon captain—“I do not dare, in your presence, to utter the name of him I love; but I consent to writing it.” And the next night, during the performance of a ballet at the Louvre, she glided near to Lauzun, and slipped a paper into his hand. It bore only these words—“_It is you_.” Then it was a very different affair. Who so ardent, and passionately in love as Lauzun? Carried away by his feelings, he broke into the bedchamber of Mademoiselle unannounced, and falling at her feet where she sat before a mirror, in the scantiest of _déshabillé_, eloquently gave way to expressions of rapture, and the good fortune which had impelled him to seek her at such a delightful moment, when her charms lay revealed in all the fulness of their beauty. The Grande Mademoiselle was thin to scragginess—but _qu’importe_? She believed his protestations, loved Lauzun ever more and more, and passed her time in devising the way for obtaining the king’s consent to their union. Meanwhile the king’s conduct, in publicly taking about with him his two mistresses, was beginning to create such gross scandal, that it called down forcible rebuke from the pulpits. In regard to la Montespan, while her husband must have been dense indeed not to be aware of the true state of the case, he was allowed to be credited with the ignorance of it. Among the preachers most severe in their rebuke, was the Père Bourdaloue, the eloquent Jesuit. He spared no word in endeavouring to bring Louis to some sense of decent living, and it was not without effect—before all, on Louise de la Vallière, whose weeping was audible from where she sat in a dark corner of the Jesuit church of St Louis.