It took no time for her to arrive at the conclusion that Madame Louis Quatorze and her faithful card-divining friend and fortune-teller, Madame Arnoul, were at the bottom of the business, and under promise on the duke’s part of inviolable secrecy, she told him of the adventure in the Vosges and the very conspicuous part she had played in it, actuated by her enmity towards de Montespan. The farrier, she did not doubt, was honest enough; but, simple and credulous, he had been made the tool of the two women—an easy prey to Madame Arnoul, who, living at Marseilles, had seen him, and reckoned him up as suitable for her design. The duke was of opinion that there was no doubt Ninon’s solution of the mystery was correct, and he added that, this being the case, it was her duty to inform the king of it—“For who knows,” said Duras, “that he may not be weak enough to obey the ghost’s behests, and disgrace himself and his throne in the eye of all Europe and the universe, by seating the Maintenon upon it.” It was a most serious matter—most serious. Ninon, however, shrank from the suggestion. She was a woman of courage; but recent experience had taught her the lengths of malice to which her old friend Françoise could go, and she had no mind to measure weapons with her again. To make clean confession of the affair to the king, was simply to bring down upon herself all the thunderbolts of the hatred of the woman whose ingenuity was never at fault in plausibility, and the finding the way to retain the kings good graces at no matter what cost to anyone. Ninon saw a far better plan than sacrificing herself for the destruction of the scheme. She begged the duke not to compromise her to the king; but to represent to him the advisability of sending competent and trusted persons to the Ribeauvillé château, accompanied by the duke himself, and there to sound and search the recesses and panelling of the haunted room and the adjacent one she indicated, and little more would be necessary to prove to His Majesty that he had been duped. The journey taken, and the search made, the emissaries duly returned. Their report fully satisfied the king that he had been victimised, by some person or persons unknown, in the gloomy old mansion—and his marriage with Madame de Maintenon was not then or ever publicly and officially proclaimed. If he had any suspicions of her complicity, he made no sign of them; either he thought her incapable of using such base means of attaining the desired end, or, on the other hand, he was indulgent to the not unnatural desire to see published the fact of the honour he had bestowed on her. At all events, calm and serene, outwardly dignified, unruffled, Madame Louis Quatorze dwelt on at Versailles, in the odour of all the sanctimoniousness and decorum the coming of herself and of Père la Chaise had imparted to the vast place.