"There is one among them," said the mistress (it was Mme. de Saint-Périer), "who tells me she expects her pleasure in going to see her friends and receiving them in her own house." "Assuredly," replied Mme. de Maintenon, "there is much pleasure in living with our friends and conversing with open hearts, as we say, and no constraint. But there is," she added in a lower voice to the mistress, "a pagan maxim, which I think very stern; it is to act with our friends as if we were sure they would some day be our enemies. I could secure myself, it seems to me, by letting my friends see nothing that was bad in me; I should try never to be wrong in their presence, nor in that of persons whom I loved less, because so many circumstances occur in life to separate us that friends often become enemies, and then we are in despair at having trusted them too much, and having spoken to them freely without reserve. "Mme. de Montespan and I, for example," she added, continuing to speak in a low voice to the mistress,--"we have been the greatest friends in the world; she liked me much, and I, simple as I was, trusted her friendship. She was a woman of much intelligence and full of charm; she spoke to me with great confidence, and told me all she thought. And yet we are now at variance, without either of us having intended it. It is assuredly without fault on my side; and yet if either has cause to complain it is she; for she may say with truth: 'I was the cause of her elevation; it was I who made her known and liked by the king, and she became the favourite while I was dismissed.' On the other hand, was I wrong to accept the affection of the king on the conditions upon which I accepted it? Did I do wrong to give him good advice and to try, as best I could, to break up his connections? But let us return to what I meant to say in the first instance. If in loving Mme. de Montespan as I loved her I had been led to enter in a bad way into her intrigues, if I had given her bad advice, either from the world's point of view or from God's, if--instead of urging her all I could to break her bonds--I had shown her the means of retaining the king's affection, would she not have in her hands at this moment the means of destroying me if she wished revenge? 'This (or that) person whom you esteem so much,' she used to say to me, 'said to me thus and so; she urged me to do this, she counselled me that,' etc. Have I not good reason to say that we should not let anything be seen even to our friends which they might use in the end against us? Sooner or later things are known, and it is very annoying to have to blush for things we have said and done in times past."