_Madame la Duchesse_, however, had certainly no right to take exception to her husband’s little affairs, for, though Madame de Caylus assures us that she “lived with him like an angel,” it would seem that her marriage vows sat very lightly upon her. This daughter of Madame de Montespan was an exceedingly pretty, accomplished, and charming young woman; but, if she had inherited her mother’s beauty, intelligence, and fascination, she had also her full share of that too celebrated lady’s less agreeable qualities, being selfish, extravagant, and deceitful, while her mordant wit made her universally dreaded. “Her wit shines in her eyes,” writes _Madame_; “but there is some malignity in them also. I always say that she reminds me of a pretty cat which, while you play with it, lets you feel its claws.” “Although she was slightly deformed,” says Saint-Simon, “her face was formed by the most tender loves and her nature made to dally with them.... She possessed the art of placing every one at their ease; there was nothing about her which did not tend naturally to please, with a grace unparalleled, even in her slightest actions. She made captive even those who had the most cause to fear her, and those who had the best of reasons to hate her required often to recall the fact to resist her charms.... Sportive, gay, and merry, she passed her youth in frivolity and in pleasures of all kinds,[246] and, whenever the opportunity presented itself, they extended even to debauchery. With these qualities, she possessed much intelligence and much capacity for intrigue and affairs, with a suppleness which cost her nothing. She was scornful, mocking, bitterly sarcastic, incapable of friendship and very capable of hatred; mischievous, haughty, implacable, prolific in base artifices and in the most cruel _chansons_, with which she gaily assailed persons whom she pretended to love and who passed their lives with her.[247] She was the siren of the poets; she had all their charms and all their perils.”