The queen had died on the 30th of July, 1683, piously and gently as she had lived. “This is the first sorrow she ever caused me,” said the king, thus rendering homage, in his superb and unconscious egotism, to the patient virtue of the wife he had put to such cruel trials. Madame de Maintenon was agitated but resolute. “Madame de Montespan has plunged into the deepest devoutness,” she wrote, two months after the queen’s death: “It is quite time she edified us; as for me, I no longer think of retiring.” Her strong common-sense and her far-sighted ambition, far more than her virtue, had secured her against rocks ahead; henceforth she saw the goal, she was close upon it, she moved toward it with an even step. The date has never been ascertained exactly of the king’s private marriage with Madame de Maintenon. It took place probably eighteen months or two years after the queen’s death; the king was forty-seven, Madame de Maintenon fifty. “She had great remains of beauty, bright and sprightly eyes, an incomparable grace,” says St. Simon, who detested her, “an air of ease and yet of restraint and respect, a great deal of cleverness with a speech that was sweet, correct, in good terms and naturally eloquent and brief.” Madame de La Vallière had held sway over the young and passionate heart of the prince, Madame de Montespan over the court, Madame de Maintenon alone established her empire over the man and the king. Alone she had any part in affairs, a smaller part than has frequently been made out, but important, nevertheless, and sometimes decisive. Ministers went occasionally to do their work in her presence with the king, who would turn to her when the questions were embarrassing, and ask, “What does your Solidity think?” The opinions she gave were generally moderate and discreet. Whatever the apparent reserve and modesty with which it was cloaked, the real power of Madame de Maintenon over the king’s mind peeped out more and more into broad daylight. She promoted it dexterously by her extreme anxiety to please him as well as by her natural and sincere attachment to the children whom she had brought up and who had a place near the heart of Louis XIV.