On April 6, Madame de Sévigné wrote: 'Madame de Montespan is enraged; she cried a good deal yesterday, and you may guess the martyrdom her pride is suffering.' On June 15, she replies to her daughter: 'It is an infernal position, as you say, that of her who goes four paces ahead' (alluding to Madame de Montespan). She launched out into epigrams against her fortunate rival, just as she had satirised Louise de la Vallière. 'Madame de Montespan,' writes Bussy-Rabutin, 'seeing that the great Alcandre (Louis XIV) was drifting away from her more and more every day, became so choleric that she began publicly to abuse Mademoiselle de Fontanges. She told every one that the great Alcandre was surely not very fastidious to love a creature who had had her little love affairs in the country; that she had neither wit nor education; and that, properly speaking, she was only a beautiful painting. She said a thousand other things about her equally irritating. Indeed, she always displayed the same proud spirit which nothing had been able to quell.' Mademoiselle de Fontanges responded by loading her predecessor and all her children with costly presents. She had just been proclaimed a duchess with an annuity of 20,000 crowns. The fury of Madame de Montespan broke out. She had a violent scene with Louis, and when the king reproached her with her pride, her domineering spirit, and other defects, she replied with haughty scorn, concentrating all the violence of her wrath in one of those hard and bitter words which had made her so much feared in the time of her reign; she answered, 'that if she had the imperfections of which he accused her, at any rate she did not smell worse than he.' 'My mother,' said the girl Monvoisin, 'told me that Madame de Montespan wanted at that time to go to extremities, and tried to induce her to do things for which she had much repugnance. My mother gave me to understand that it was against the king, and after hearing what had passed at the house of Trianon (a sorceress, partner of La Voisin), I could not doubt it.' The deserted mistress resolved to put an end to Louis and Mademoiselle de Fontanges. She applied to the sorceress of Villeneuve-sur-Gravois, and had no difficulty in getting together four accomplices in the terrible room in the Rue Beauregard: these four were La Voisin and La Trianon, who undertook to put Louis out of the way, and Romani and Bertrand, 'artists in poisons,' who promised to kill Mademoiselle de Fontanges. Madame de Montespan gave them money.