The enamoured Secretary of State begins by deploring that he had been unable to take farewell of the lady before the Court left Dijon; but the mere suspicion that he had done so had so enraged the Queen-Mother that to have defied her would have probably entailed his prompt disgrace. On the other hand, the Prince de Condé, whom he had taken upon himself to inform of the interesting event which had taken place at Dijon and of the subsequent disappearance of its heroine, had expressed much annoyance, because he had happened to mention that he had lent Isabelle a dressing-gown, being evidently of opinion that it was a piece of presumption for any one but himself to assist the lady. “It is very strange,” he writes, “that, being abandoned, as I was able to tell him you had been by every one, the prince should take it ill that you have been visited and succoured by those who were incurring risks in order to serve you.” However, he should not cease to employ his life and his property for her, “the person whom he loved and esteemed the most in the world.” But, at the same time, he thinks it would be perhaps advisable for her to return the dressing-gown, “since he saw clearly that it was not agreeable to the prince [Condé] that she should make use of it.” And he concludes by reminding her of the happy days they had spent together when the Court was in Normandy the previous summer, when he had received “_tant de contentement_.” In a postscript, he bids her burn his letter, which, in view of the fact that a copy was already in the hands of M. de Ventoux, seems a rather unnecessary precaution. Isabelle’s reply was calculated to satisfy the most exacting of lovers. It was impossible to tell him what pleasure his letter had given her; words quite failed her to describe it. She did nothing all day but think of him, and he might rest assured that, whatever Fortune might have in store for her, she would never cease to love him. [The minx will write much the same to Condé a little later.] She sends him a scarf woven with her own fair hands, two pictures of saints which she has painted, a heart, and a book, the “Patience of Job,” which, is “_fort à propos_.” She concludes by kissing his hands “thousands and millions of times.”[60] It was, as we have seen, through the medium of Du Fresne that Condé, retained by the bedside of his dying wife, was informed of the misfortunes of Isabelle. To receive such news of his mistress through the courtesy of a rival occasioned him, as may be supposed, the keenest mortification; and his jealousy reveals itself very plainly in the first letter which he addressed to the lady: