All this seems to us exaggerated. We believe Madame de Prie was too frivolous to experience such despair. She had not waited for her exile in order to know those alternations of sadness and folly which accompany vice even when it has the air of being happy. For some time, already, the taste for intrigue, the thirst for pleasure, the ardor of ambition, had kindled in her veins a fever which undermined her strength. Her plumpness had been succeeded by an excessive lankness. Struggling against ill-health with extreme energy, she tried to build herself up, to put a good face on everything, to shake off trouble, and find amusement. Though her body was so much weakened, says the Marquis d’Argenson, her mind and temper were still as gay, shrewd, merry, and frivolous as in the times of her greatest prosperity. Even in her misfortune she had courtiers who deceived her. She had become ugly, and her flatterers continued to tell her she was adorable. She was hopelessly ill, and her physicians told her she was doing very well. Two days before her death she played in a comedy, and recited three hundred lines with as much sentiment as memory. Nevertheless, she had predicted her approaching death. People thought, however, that this was but a jest, a pleasantry. Hence, when she breathed her last, October 6, 1728, after such convulsions that her toes were turned towards her heels, a rumor that she had poisoned herself got abroad. Such a suicide is improbable, and not easily reconcilable with the superficial character of Madame de Prie. M. Michelet adds that she made a farcical confession (_bouffonna une confession_)--these are the expressions employed by an historian who is often too fanciful. What can M. Michelet know about it? Why does he affirm that she did not repent of her faults and errors? Greater sinners than she have been illuminated at the last moment by a ray of light. It is certain, at all events, that the sudden and terrible death of this young woman of only twenty-nine years, who expiated so cruelly her shameful successes, was a striking lesson for her contemporaries. Was Madame de Prie’s death-bed conversion sincere? God only knows. IV THE KING FAITHFUL TO THE QUEEN