indignation she made a false step in her state-craft of a nature one can hardly imagine a person so astute as the Princess making. This blunder led to a great _imbroglio_. [26] Saint Simon. The question has been raised--Did Madame des Ursins always use the intimate and uncontrolled influence she had obtained over the young Queen of fourteen in a purely devoted and disinterested way? It would be difficult, certainly, to answer in the affirmative. Louville, her rival and enemy, a man of talent and ardour, but passionate, represents her as the wickedest woman on earth, to be got rid of at the earliest possible moment and at any cost, "sordid and thievish to a marvellous degree." He raises the same accusation against Orry, a clever man whom Louis XIV. had sent to Spain to put some order into her finances. These accusations seem to have been unjustifiable. The Marshal Duke of Berwick, who kept himself aloof from all these odious bickerings, does more justice to Orry, and everything leads the impartial student to think that Madame des Ursins on that score comes out of the scrutiny with still cleaner hands. "_Je suis gueuse, il est vrai_," she writes to Madame de Noailles on first going to Spain, "_mais je suis encore plus fiere_." Detailing to Madame de Maintenon somewhat later the indignities they both had to put up with from accusations of a like nature, she speaks of them in a tone of lofty irony and sovereign contempt which appears to exclude anything like falsehood. But what seems more certain--if the truth must be told--is, although a little singular at first sight, that at the age of sixty and upwards, Madame des Ursins still had lovers. "She is hair-brained in her conduct,"[27] wrote Louville to the Duke and Duchess de Beauvilliers. One Sieur d'Aubigny, a kind of household steward whom she had promoted to be her equerry, was lodged in the _Retiro_ palace near the apartments of her women, where he was seen one day brushing his teeth very unconcernedly at the window. _C'etait un beau et grand drole tres-bien fait et tres-decouple de corps et d'esprit_,[28] and not a _bete brute_, as Louville calls him. But he was bold and somewhat insolent, as one who conceived that he had a right to be so. On another occasion, Louville and the Duke de Medina-Coeli entering the apartments of Madame des Ursins, into which she ushered them in order that they might talk more unrestrainedly, D'Aubigny who was installed at the other end, seeing only the Princess and believing her to be alone, began to apostrophise her in terms of very rude and coarse familiarity, which threw all present into confusion. The feminine failing of Madame des Ursins, was, we are told, this; "gallantry and _l'entetement de sa personne_ was in her the dominant and overweening weakness above all else, even to the latest period of her life." So Saint Simon says, and he renders her full justice moreover for her spirited and elevated qualities.