Once only was she pitiless; but she was wounded then in her tenderest spot. Mme. de Maintenon had imported from Strasburg (_expressly to annoy me_, thought Madame) two girls of equivocal birth who called themselves Comtesses Palatine and whom she placed in the suite of her nieces. The first dauphine (Monseigneur's wife, a Princess of Bavaria) spoke of this to Madame, weeping, but not daring to resent an affront which was aimed at both. "Let me settle that," replied Madame. "I'll manage it; for when I am right nothing frightens me." The next day she arranged an accidental meeting in the park with one of the two self-styled Comtesses Palatine, and treated her in such a manner (the astounding terms have been preserved) that the poor girl was taken ill, and finally died of it. Louis XIV. contented himself with saying to Madame, "It is not safe to meddle with you in the matter of your family--life depends upon it." To which Madame replied, "I don't like impostors." And she never felt the slightest regret for what she had done. The trait is characteristic in a nature that was otherwise essentially kind. All vehement passion easily becomes cruel when face to face with an object that irritates and braves it. In this case the execution performed by Madame appeared to her under the form of a rigorous duty of honour. The life that Madame led at the Court of France varied, necessarily, during the fifty and one years that she spent there; she could not live at the age of sixty as she had done at twenty. But at all times, before and after the death of Monsieur, she had managed to make for herself a retreat and a sort of solitude. The exaggerated and incongruous sides of Madame's nature being now sufficiently visible and well known, I desire to neglect nothing that will show the firm and elevated parts of her soul. From Saint-Cloud June 17, 1698, she writes thus:--