Madame, pre-eminently princess of a sovereign house, who never, with all her natural human qualities and her free and easy ways, forgot the duties of birth and grandeur, she of whom it was said, "No great personage ever knew her rights better or made them better felt by others,"--Madame held nothing in so much horror and contempt as misalliances. The gallery at Versailles long echoed with the resounding blow she applied to her son on the day when, having consented to marry the natural daughter of Louis XIV., he approached his mother according to custom, to kiss her hand. Now of all misalliances what could be greater or more inexcusable to her eyes than that which placed Mme. de Maintenon beside Louis XIV.? Madame, natural, frank, letting her feelings willingly escape her, liking to pour them out, often in excess beyond themselves and observing no caution, could not away with the cold procedure, prudent, cautious, mysterious, polite, and unassailable, of a person to whom she attributed a thousand schemes blacker and deeper than those of hell. She disliked her for little things and disliked her for great ones. She supposed that it was Mme. de Maintenon who, in concert with Père de La Chaise, had plotted and carried through the persecution of the Reformers; in this she was not only human, but she found herself once more a little of a Calvinist or a Lutheran with a touch of the old leaven; she thought close at hand what the refugees in Holland were writing from afar. She believed she saw in Mme. de Maintenon a Tartuffe in a sage-coloured gown. And besides--another grievance almost as serious!--if there was no longer any etiquette at Court, if ranks were no longer preserved and defined, Mme. de Maintenon was the cause of it. "There is no longer a Court in France," she writes, "and it is the fault of the Maintenon, who, finding that the king would not declare her queen, was determined there should be no more great functions, and has persuaded the young dauphine [the Duchesse de Bourgogne] to stay in her, Mme. de Maintenon's rooms, where there is no distinction of rank or dignity. Under pretext of its being a game, the old woman has induced the dauphine and the princesses to wait upon her at her toilet and meals; she has even persuaded them to hand her the dishes, change her plates, and pour what she drank. Everything is topsy-turvy, and none of them know their right place nor what they are. I have never mixed myself up in all that: when I go to see the lady I place myself close to her niche in an armchair, and I never help her either at her meals or her toilet. Some persons have advised me to do as the dauphine and the princesses do, but I answer: 'I was never brought up to do servile things, and I am too old to play childish games.' Since then no one has said anything more about it."