The Château of Courbépine, which Louis XV. had fixed as Madame de Prie’s place of exile, was situated a little to the north of the town of Bernay, in the midst of an immense wooded plain. It had been purchased by the Marquis de Prie, not long after his marriage, from Léonor de Matignon, Bishop of Lisieux. At first, she received but few visitors, but when it became known that _Monsieur le Duc_ had expressed a very ardent desire to see her, and had told the Maréchal de Villars that “he himself was the cause of all her misfortunes and that she did not deserve them; that she had always been disinterested, and that the unsatisfactory condition of her affairs would in time prove this,” people began to think that, in view of a possible return of the prince to power, it would be imprudent to ignore the woman who still retained his affections. From that time it became quite the fashion to go and spend a day or two with the proscribed, and the latter never had any cause to complain of lack of company. Nevertheless, she felt bitterly the change in her position, and could not disguise from herself the fact that, notwithstanding the chivalrous endeavours of _Monsieur le Duc_ to saddle himself with the responsibility for their common misfortune, she had largely contributed to it. She saw, too, her relatives and _protégés_ deprived of their charges and reduced in some instances to poverty; and this troubled her sorely. There can be no doubt that, in time, she would have been permitted to return, if not to the Court, at least to Paris and Chantilly; but her health, always delicate, had begun to give way beneath the stress of so many agitations. She demanded and obtained authorization to visit the waters of Forges, but the relief they afforded her was only temporary. In the early autumn of 1727 she met with a carriage accident, and though the injuries she received were not in themselves very serious, they hastened her death, which took place on 7 October, 1727, in her thirtieth year. Her enemies attributed her death to poison administered by her own hand, and the Marquis d’Argenson has published, in his “Mémoires,” a highly-coloured version of this hypothesis, upon which we need not dwell here, since its absurdity has now been clearly established. * * * * *