The anxieties of Madame de Montespan were further enhanced by the brilliance, increasing every day, of a new star in the sky of Versailles. At its rising it had shed a pale, discreet, modest light, but a light which twinkled with little mocking scintillations. The widow Scarron, now become Madame de Maintenon, had been chosen as governess of the children of the king and Madame de Montespan. What strides the governess's fortune had taken in a few years! 'But let us speak of the friend' (Madame de Maintenon), writes Madame de Sévigné on May 6, 1676: 'she is still more triumphant than the Montespan. Everything is submitted to her dominion. All the chamber-women of her neighbour are hers: one hands her the rouge-pot on her knees; another brings her her gloves; a third puts her to sleep; she salutes no one, and I fancy that really she laughs in her sleeve at this servitude.' Madame de Sévigné thus tells us what was passing at court; Marguerite Monvoisin will tell us what was going on among the sorceresses. 'The daughter of La Voisin,' writes La Reynie, 'says that she has seen this sort of mass celebrated over the body by Guibourg in her mother's house. She helped her mother to get things ready: a mattress on seats, two stools at the sides, on which were candlesticks with candles; after which Guibourg came out of the little side-chamber clothed in his chasuble--white, spotted with black fir-cones--and after that La Voisin brought in the woman on whose body the mass was to be said. Madame de Montespan had this sort of mass said three years ago (_i.e._ in 1676) at her mother's house, where she came about ten o'clock and only left at midnight. And when La Voisin told her that it was necessary for her to fix a time when the other two masses might be said, which were necessary if her affair was to be successful, Madame de Montespan said that she could not find time, that La Voisin would have to do what was necessary to assure success, which she promised her and did, and the masses were said on La Voisin herself by Guibourg.' (This again shows the sincerity of the sorceress in the carrying out of these practices.) 'The girl Voisin having notified all the circumstances of the proceeding, the arrangement of the place, that of the person--she knew Madame de Montespan--the preparations of the priest clothed in his sacerdotal vestments, the terms of the incantation, in which the documents show that the names of Louis de Bourbon and Madame de Montespan were mentioned--the girl Voisin adds that a child had its throat cut at the mass said for Madame de Montespan at her mother's.'