For some time, Philip V. treated these reports as mere inventions and calumnies, "the offspring of envy, hatred, and ambition." All that was said concerning the omnipotence of Madame des Ursins, of her empire over him, of her hopes, her designs, of that same corridor, of their private interviews, left him unmoved and indifferent. The Count de Bergueick, until then a stanch adherent of the Princess des Ursins, himself declared that that omnipotence had become insupportable, and he asked permission to return to Flanders, whence he had been summoned. Philip V. allowed him to depart, and Madame des Ursins lost not one jot of her authority. But the complaints, the murmurs, the idle talk continued, the incessant repetition of which could not fail at last to make an impression upon a weak mind. In the end the King grew wearied, and vexed, especially at the reports relating to such a ridiculous marriage, to a matrimonial project which wounded his self-love as a man as well as his royal dignity, and tormented besides by the exigencies of a temperament, in which the flesh was far too predominant over the spirit--"Find me a wife," said he, one day to Madame des Ursins, "our _tete-a-tetes_ scandalise the people."[71] [71] Memoire de Duclos, tom, i., p. 230. CHAPTER IV. THE PRINCESSES ELIGIBLE TO BECOME PHILIP'S CONSORT. "FIND me a wife!" The sentence was like a thunderclap in the ears of Madame des Ursins, so long accustomed as she had been to govern and domineer. Where to find one--one like Marie Louise of Savoy, who would consent to retain her in the same functions, and who, like her, with intelligence and firmness of mind, would have a boundless confidence in her _camerara mayor_, and a docility proof against everything? Louis XIV., being consulted, replied to his grandson that he gave him his choice between a princess of Portugal, a princess of Bavaria, and a princess of Parma. The first was greatly to the taste of the Castilians; they had always had reason to praise their Portuguese queens, and they attached to such choice hopes of renewed political unity for the Spanish peninsula to the profit of Castile, which thus, by marriages, would absorb, on the left, Portugal, as it had appropriated on the right, the kingdom of Arragon. But the Court of the King of Portugal, the brother of that princess, had been the rendezvous and the asylum of aristocratic and Austrian opposition. These antecedents alarmed Madame des Ursins on her own account, and did not appear much more assuring for Philip V. Was it not known, on the other hand, that Portugal--especially since the treaty of Utrecht, since the Bourbons had become, in spite of that nation, the immutable possessors of Spain--dreaded those neighbouring kings, after having previously loved them so much as liberators, and on that account had placed herself under the protection of England, the enemy of all the reigning branches of that powerful and ambitious house?