Memoirs of the Court of Louis XIV. and of the Regency — Volume 04

From the opening

Victor Amadeus II. The Grand Duchess, Consort of Cosimo II. of Florence The Duchesse de Lorraine, Elizabeth-Charlotte d'Orleans The Duc du Maine The Duchesse du Maine Louvois Louis XV. Anecdotes and Historical Particulars of Various Persons Explanatory Notes

It is said that the King of Sicily is always in ill humour, and that he is always quarrelling with his mistresses. He and Madame de Verrue have quarrelled, they say, for whole days together. I wonder how the good Queen can love him with such constancy; but she is a most virtuous person and patience itself. Since the King had no mistresses he lives upon better terms with her. Devotion has softened his heart and his temper.

Madame de Verrue is, I dare say, forty-eight years of age (1718). I shared some of the profits of her theft by buying of her 160 medals of gold, the half of those which she stole from the King of Sicily. She had also boxes filled with silver medals, but they were all sold in England.

[The Comtesse de Verrue was married at the age of thirteen years. Victor Amadeus, then King of Sardinia, fell in love with her. She would have resisted, and wrote to her mother and her husband, who were both absent. They only joked her about it. She then took that step which all the world knows. At the age of eighteen, being at a dinner with a relation of her husband's, she was poisoned. The person she suspected was the same that was dining with her; he did not quit her, and wanted to have her blooded. Just at this time the Spanish Ambassador at Piedmont sent her a counter-poison which had a happy effect: she recovered, but never would mention whom she suspected. She got tired of the King, and persuaded her brother, the Chevalier de Lugner, to come and carry her off, the King being then upon a journey. The rendezvous was in a chapel about four leagues distant from Turin.

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