"What is amiss with him this morning?" asked Boileau in a whisper, nodding his head in the direction of the royal group. "I fear that his sleep has not improved his temper."
"He becomes harder and harder to amuse," said Racine, shaking his head. "I am to be at Madame De Maintenon's room at three to see whether a page or two of the Phedre may not work a change."
"My friend," said the architect, "do you not think that madame herself might be a better consoler than your Phedre?"
"Madame is a wonderful woman. She has brains, she has heart, she has tact – she is admirable."
"And yet she has one gift too many."
"And that is?"
"Age."
"Pooh! What matter her years when she can carry them like thirty? What an eye! What an arm! And besides, my friends, he is not himself a boy any longer."
"Ah, but that is another thing."
"A man's age is an incident, a woman's a calamity."
"Very true. But a young man consults his eye, and an older man his ear. Over forty, it is the clever tongue which wins; under it, the pretty face."
"Ah, you rascal! Then you have made up your mind that five-and-forty years with tact will hold the field against nine-and-thirty with beauty. Well, when your lady has won, she will doubtless remember who were the first to pay court to her."
"But I think that you are wrong, Racine."
"Well, we shall see."
"And if you are wrong – "
"Well, what then?"
"Then it may be a little serious for you."
"And why?"
"The Marquise de Montespan has a memory."
"Her influence may soon be nothing more."
"Do not rely too much upon it, my friend. When the Fontanges came up from Provence, with her blue eyes and her copper hair, it was in every man's mouth that Montespan had had her day. Yet Fontanges is six feet under a church crypt, and the marquise spent two hours with the king last week. She has won once, and may again."
"Ah, but this is a very different rival. This is no slip of a country girl, but the cleverest woman in France."
"Pshaw, Racine, you know our good master well, or you should, for you seem to have been at his elbow since the days of the Fronde. Is he a man, think you, to be amused forever by sermons, or to spend his days at the feet of a lady of that age, watching her at her tapestry-work, and fondling her poodle, when all the fairest faces and brightest eyes of France are as thick in his salons as the tulips in a Dutch flower-bed? No, no, it will be the Montespan, or if not she, some younger beauty."