obey her in everything and without reserve--which was quite true. Madame des Ursins was arrested, therefore, and carried off instantaneously, just as she was, in her full dress of ceremony, and hurried across Spain as fast as six horses could drag her. It was mid-winter--no provisions to be found in the inns of Spain; no beds; not a change of clothes--the ground covered with frost and snow; and the Princess was then in her seventy-second year. A lady's maid and two officers of the guard accompanied her in the carriage. [75] "I only ask one thing of you," wrote Elizabeth Farnese to Philip V.; "that is the dismissal of Madame des Ursins;" and the king had replied--"At least do not spare your blow; for if she only talk to you for a couple of hours, she will enchain you, and hinder us from sleeping together, as happened to the late Queen."--Duclos. [76] Madame des Ursins, stupified, sought to make excuses. "La Reine alors, redoublant de furie et de menaces, se mit a crier qu'on fit sortir cette folle de sa presence et de son logis, et l'en fit mettre dehors par les epaules."--Saint Simon. "I know not how I managed to endure all the fatigue of that journey," she wrote Madame de Maintenon, whilst wandering about the French frontiers, eighteen days after the scene at Xadraque. "They compelled me to sleep upon straw, and to breakfast in a very different style to the repast to which I had been accustomed. I have not forgotten in the details which I have taken the liberty to send the King (Louis XIV.) that I ate only two stale eggs daily; it struck me that such a fact would excite him to take pity upon a faithful subject who has not deserved, it seems to me, in any way such contemptuous treatment. I am going to Saint Jean de Luz to take a little repose and learn what it may please the King to do in my behalf." And from this last-named town--at which she was set at liberty--and up to her arrival at which she had unfalteringly maintained the strength and constancy of her character, neither a tear nor a complaint escaping her--a few days later she wrote again to Madame de Maintenon: "Here I shall await the King's commands. I am in a small house--the ocean before me, sometimes calm, sometimes agitated: it is an image of what passes in courts. You know what has happened to me; I shall not implore in vain your generous compassion. I agree perfectly with you that stability is only to be found in God. Assuredly it is not to be found in the human breast; for who could be more certain than I was of the King of Spain's heart?"