Page:Memoirs of Madame de Motteville on Anne of Austria and her court.djvu/25

Rh still received an annual payment of six hundred limes from the queen, and in 1639 she was thought worthy, for her beauty and good reputation, to be married to M. Langlois de Motteville, president of the Chamber of Accounts of Normandy, who made her his third wife. "This was an ill-assorted marriage," says the "Journal de Savants" (January, 1724); "the president was eighty years old, and the wife only eighteen. It is said that she wearied of her half of the bed, so that sometimes after the goodman went to sleep she made her waiting-maid take her place, and the old man never found it out." If this detail, stated by a grave journal, is correct, it was the liveliest piece of giddiness of Madame de Motteville's life. Her nature, calm and unimpassioned, seems never to have suffered from such a marriage. "In the year 1$39, having married M. de Motteville," she says, "I found much comfort, with an abundance of everything; and if I had been willing to profit by the friendship he had for me and receive the advantages he could and would have given me, I should have been rich after his death." But she neglected these views of self-interest, and, like all others exiled from Court, she thought only of the hope held out by the coming death of the cardinal, at which time she expected her return to favour. On the death of the cardinal and that of the king, one of the queen's first acts was to recall all those who had been dismissed on account of their love for her, and Madame de Motteville was among them. She was henceforth attached to the queen, less as woman-in-waiting (which was her title) than as one of the persons of her daily intercourse and intimacy. Wise, discreet, and punctual, of a gentle but playful mind, a curiosity both serious and readily amused, with an observing eye that did not seek to be piercing or to look deep, but contented itself with seeing clearly that which went on about her, she spent twenty-two