The masked balls given at the time of the Dauphin’s marriage are excellent opportunities to display one’s self. At the Hôtel de Ville ball the prettiest women of the bourgeoisie are grouped together on a platform hung with velvet, silk, and gold. Madame d’Étioles appears as Diana the huntress, powdered, the quiver on her shoulder, the silver arrow in her hand. For an instant she takes off her mask and pretends to let fly an arrow at the King. “Beautiful huntress,” cries the King, “the darts you discharge are fatal.” Then she resumes her mask and slips into the crowd, but dropping her lace handkerchief as she goes. Louis XV. picks it up and, sultan-like, launches it with a gallant hand at the beautiful unknown. “The handkerchief is thrown,” people mutter on all sides. Madame d’Étioles is about, then, to reach her goal. She has no reproach to make against her husband, by whom she has had two children: a son born in 1741, who only lived six months, and a daughter, Alexandrine, born in 1743, who will live until 1754. This husband is an excellent man, gentle, affectionate, easy to live with, much in love with his wife, not at all jealous, happy and proud to be the husband of the prettiest woman in Paris. But what would you have? Madame d’Étioles has taken it into her head to be the King’s mistress. ’Tis a fantasy of a coquettish woman which she must absolutely realize. Taking advantage of her husband’s stay in the country, and protected by one of her relatives, Bivet, valet de chambre to the Dauphin, she makes her way into the palace of Versailles and parades a romantic passion for Louis XV. She says she is menaced by M. d’Étioles’ vengeance and begs the King to shelter her. The monarch is affected and installs her mysteriously in the chamber formerly occupied by Madame de Mailly. Poor M. d’Étioles, on his return to Paris, learns what has befallen him. He faints away at the fatal tidings, and afterwards writes his wife a letter so touching that Louis XV., after reading it, cannot avoid saying: “Madame, you have a very honest husband.” In despair at first, the betrayed husband at last resigns himself. He does not try to contend with a king, and repairs philosophically to the south of France, to make an inspection into finances which is part of his official duties as deputy farmer-general. At court there is great commotion. It seems impossible to imagine that a woman of the middle classes, _une robine_, as D’Argenson says, can replace a great lady like the Duchess de Châteauroux. The Duke de Luynes writes in his Memoirs, March 11, 1745: “All the masked balls have given occasion for talk concerning the King’s new amours, and principally of a Madame d’Étioles, who is young and pretty. It is said that for some time she is nearly always here, and that she is the King’s choice. If such is the fact, it can hardly be anything more than a case of gallantry, and not of mistress.”