She was not so inferior to the king as might be thought; or rather she was not inferior to him at all except in politeness, in moderation, in the spirit of consistency and sobriety. In certain respects she judged him with much intelligence, and with freer and broader good sense than he was capable of himself; she thought him ignorant in many ways, and she was right. What she valued most in him was his uprightness of feeling, and the accuracy of his _coup-d'oeil_ when left to himself; also the quality of his mind, the charm of his intercourse, the excellent expression of his thoughts,--it was, in short, a certain loftiness of nature which attracted and charmed her in Louis XIV. She aided more than any other in consoling him and diverting his mind after the death of the Duchesse de Bourgogne; she went to him every evening at the permitted hour, and she saw that he was pleased with her company. "There is no one but Madame who does not leave me now," said Louis XIV. "I see that she is glad to be with me." Madame has ingenuously expressed the sort of open and sincere affection that she felt for Louis XIV. by saying: "If the king had been my father I could not have loved him more than I did love him, and I had pleasure in being with him." When the king's health declined and he neared his last hour, we find Madame laying bare her grief in her letters; she, whose son was about to become regent, she dreads more than any one the change of reign. "The king is not well," she says, August 15, 1715, "and it troubles me to the point of being half ill myself; I have lost both sleep and appetite. God grant I may be mistaken! but if what I fear should happen it would be for me the greatest of misfortunes." She relates the last scenes of farewell with true and visible emotion. The little good that has been done in the final years of that long reign she attributes to Louis XIV.; and all that was bad she imputes to her whom she considers an evil genius and the devil personified,--to Mme. de Maintenon. And here we come to Madame's great antipathy, to what in her is almost unimaginable prejudice, hatred, and animosity so violent that they become at times comical. And truly, if Madame at a given moment had really been in love with Louis XIV., and if she had hated in Mme. de Maintenon the rival who supplanted her, she could not have expressed herself otherwise. But there is no need of that sort of explanation for a nature so easy to prejudice, so difficult to placate, and so wholly in opposition and contrast to the point of departure and proceedings of Mme. de Maintenon. Hers were antipathies of race, of condition, of temperament, which long years passed in the presence, the continual sight, the rigid restraint of their object only cultivated, secretly fomented, and exasperated. Who has not seen such long-suppressed enmities which explode when an opening is made for them?