Chapter 16 16

Mademoiselle de Fontanges.-The Pavilions of the Garden of Flora.-Rapid Triumph of the Favourite.-Her Retreat to Val-de-grace.-Her Death.

Madame de Maintenon was already forty-four years old, and appeared to be only thirty. This freshness, that she owed either to painstaking care or to her happy and quite peculiar constitution, gave her that air