For nearly two days after the disgrace of _Monsieur le Duc_ no steps were taken against his mistress. But no one at Chantilly doubted that her respite would be but a brief one. Duverney had been exiled forty leagues from Paris; all the Ministers most attached to _Monsieur le Duc_ had been relieved of their functions; Le Blanc and the Belle-Isles had been recalled, and the man who, if he had received his deserts, would have been decorating a gibbet had actually been reinstated in his old post of Secretary of State for War, in place of the honest Breteuil. In such a revolution of the palace, it was impossible for her to escape, and on the Thursday evening the blow fell, in the shape of a _lettre de cachet_ exiling her to her husband’s estate of Courbépine, in Normandy. Her parting with _Monsieur le Duc_ on the morrow was a most touching one. “She kept up the comedy to the last,” writes the author of the manuscript we have just cited. “Twice after entering her carriage she returned, not being able, she said, to depart without again embracing _Monsieur le Duc_. She appeared in despair at leaving him, and gave him all the tokens of a passionate love. The prince, on his side, was so afflicted that it is impossible to describe it.” For ourselves, we prefer to believe that the grief of Madame de Prie was as genuine as that of _Monsieur le Duc_. It would have been, indeed, strange if it had not been so, since, with all his faults, he had been to her the most devoted and generous of lovers, the truest and best of friends.