When they were
first married, Louis treated Marie Therese with kindly consideration.
He shed tears of sympathy and anguish while she suffered in giving
birth to her first child. During the following dozen years, Marie
Therese bore six sons and daughters, but all were lost except the
Dauphin, and he died before ascending the throne. These bereavements
sank deep into her heart and left a wound there that never healed.
Added to this was the spectacle that she was called on repeatedly to
witness of the King's infidelities with a succession of favorites. She
was compelled to take these women into her household and make
companions of them, knowing the while that they were really her rivals
and persecutors. She was often heard to cry out concerning one or
other of the favorites, "That woman will be the death of me." La
Valliere she could afford to forgive, for the first mistress paid for
the brief royal favor that she enjoyed by thirty-six years of rigid and
austere penitence. Other favorites, however, pursued a path of pride,
lowering their heads only under the "bludgeonings of Fate." Yet most
of them, while Marie Therese lived, respected and honored her and felt
a certain sense of shame in her presence. The brilliant and beautiful
Madame de Montespan said, some time before her scandalous relations
with the King had fairly begun, "God preserve me from being the King's
mistress. If I were so I should feel ashamed to face the Queen.
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