At the end of four months passed in the capital of Languedoc, in the depth of a retreat enlivened by an assiduous correspondence with the two courts, Madame des Ursins received permission to appear at Versailles and there to justify herself. The intervention of Madame de Maintenon had nothing more in it than was perfectly natural under the circumstances; not that she had the desire to govern Spain, as Saint Simon affirms, nor even France, however entirely she might govern Louis XIV. What she desired to establish on either side of the Pyrenees was a species of moral control of the house of Bourbon. And, by keeping her informed of the most minute particulars touching the King and Queen, by inspiring the Duchess of Burgundy's sister with the duteous affection of the elder for her _aunt_, Madame des Ursins rendered the Marquise de Maintenon the only service the latter cared for, and the only one, to speak the truth, which could add anything to her importance. The motives of Louis XIV. were of a very different kind, and his politic mind did not hesitate to sacrifice to them his grievances, however legitimate they might be. Far from pacifying the Court of Spain, the departure of the Princess des Ursins had been the signal for an outburst of the most complete anarchy. To the rule exercised by the Queen had succeeded an entire absence of direction, and matters were conducted with an incoherence so shocking, that M. de Torcy having exhausted both his advice and his patience, opened with perfect terror the despatches drawn from that Pandora's box. The accord--at least apparent, which the preponderance of Madame des Ursins had maintained among the members of the _despacho_ by the intervention of the Duke de Montellano, her creature, was abruptly broken up, and the Austrian party gathered strength from the effect of that disorder and that universal dissolution. The Archduke, proclaimed King of Spain by the Emperor under the name of Charles III. and recognised in that quality by England and Holland, had just landed at Lisbon; the campaign opened against the Portuguese had ended, after some ephemeral successes, by a sort of disbanding of the Spanish army, through want of clothing, pay, and provisions, in the supply of which nothing was done after Orry's departure, recalled to France from the same motives as the Princess. Gibraltar, the defence of which had been confided by an inexplicable negligence to fifty men, was torn away for ever by a handful of British seamen from the crown of the Catholic kings; Catalonia, Arragon, the kingdom of Valentia, made ripe for insurrection by the Prince of Darmstadt, were on the eve of escaping from their allegiance. At the beginning of 1705, the armies of Philip V. were composed of five or six thousand men in rags, their tottering fidelity daily tampered with, and the little band of French auxiliaries exhausted itself in fruitless efforts to retake Gibraltar, which, covered as it was by the English