concluded an arrangement, much to the stingy Duc's despair, by which Madame de Mazarin was to return to Italy on an allowance from her husband, as long as she remained out of the country, of 24,000 francs a year—a sum inadequate enough for one whose dot had been the greatest in Europe!

"She will eat it at the first inn she comes to," remarked the courtier Lauzun cynically.

In much less time than it had taken her to reach France from Rome, Madame de Mazarin found herself back in the Eternal City, and once more under the roof of her sister, Madame la Connétable. Much had transpired in the Palazzo Colonna since her departure. The Constable and his wife were no longer on friendly terms. The Constable had become faithless and cruel, while Madame la Connétable was in bad odour in Roman society on her own account—mixed bathing in the Tiber, Madame la Connétable in a gauze bathing costume, and the Chevalier de Lorraine all but living in the Palazzo Colonna! When the Duchesse arrived on the scene she found her sister, egged on by the Chevalier, the handsomest and most disreputable man of his century, and whose wit, vices, and exploits are plentifully sprinkled through its literature, bent on flight. At first, seeing in such a proposition fresh trouble for herself, she tried to smooth matters. But her efforts proving ineffectual, and perhaps also from a love of further adventures, she finally determined to aid and accompany her sister.

One night, when the Constable was visiting at a country house near Rome, Madame la Connétable and the Duchesse de Mazarin donned men's clothes and, attended by their maids in similar apparel, drove off in a coach to Civita Vecchia. They arrived there at two in the morning and, not finding the fishing-boat they had engaged beforehand, were obliged to wait till dawn in a wood without the town. "The coachman," says the Duchesse in her memoirs, "having hunted high and low without finding our boat, was fain to hire another, which he got for a thousand crowns. While he was thus employed the postilion becoming impatient took one of the coach-horses and had the luck to meet with our boat, but it was late when he came back, and we were obliged to walk five miles on foot and go on board about three in the afternoon without having eaten or drunk since we left Rome. We had the luck to fall in with a very honest captain; for, as it was easy to see that we were women and not beggars, any other but he would have murdered us and thrown us overboard. His crew asked us 'if we had not killed the Pope?'" In eight days these two extraordinary grandes dames disembarked from their fishing-smack at the little port of Ciotat, near Marseilles, whither they went on horseback, after one of the most thrilling journeys the Duchesse de Mazarin ever took. For their boat had been nearly lost in a storm and chased by Turkish pirates; the latter was a peril perhaps less terrifying to them than shipwreck, as it would have meant a new series of adventures.

At Marseilles they were met by the Chevalier de Lorraine and another dazzling reprobate, and the four, who had no longer any reputations to lose—for, as the Duchesse says, "there was no fable horrible enough to be invented by the wickedness of man but was reported of us"—set out light-heartedly on a tour through Provence. The ladies, still wearing men's clothes, which mightily became them, at length reached Aix-les-Bains. Here their rank and unparalleled adventures afforded them the reception curiosity always offers to unconventionality—if it is feminine and beautiful. Some were for whipping them at a cart's wheel, others for putting them in a lunatic asylum; while Madame de Grignan, the wife of the governor, sent them proper clothing with the message "that they travelled like true heroines of romance, with abundance of jewels but no clean linen," and wrote to her mother, Madame de Sévigné, that their beauty was divine. Their stay at Aix, however, was but of short duration, for the approach of the Duc de Mazarin's police agents so alarmed the Duchesse that she abandoned her sister and slipped across the frontier to Chambéry, where one of her former suitors, now become the reigning Duke of Savoy, afforded her his protection.

As for Madame la Connétable, she soon after fell into the hands of her ruthless Constable, who shut her up in various convents, from which she was always escaping, only to be caught again. Her last prison was a convent in Madrid, where she passed the greater part of her life—an imprisonment, however, nominal rather than real, for we find her frequently at the Spanish Court festivities. Madame de Villars, who saw her there, wrote to a friend in France that "she was even more beautiful at forty than at twenty, when Louis XIV. had loved her." But she was never happy. Of a different temperament from her sister Hortense, Marie Mancini had not the bravade necessary to conquer the hostility of the world. She could never live down her past, and finding herself free at the death of her husband, who begged her pardon in his will for the misery he had caused her, she returned to Italy, only to meet everywhere with a cold reception. History is not quite clear as to her last years, but it is believed that her children, at any rate, forgave her, as there is a monument to her memory in the cathedral at Pisa, where she died.

For the first time in her career the fates were really kind now to the Duchesse de Mazarin. In Savoy she found the peace and quiet that her naturally indolent temperament craved, and for three years the infatuated Duke supported her in luxury at his Court. Pleasure, of which she was ever a devotee, was agreeably tempered by a taste for literature, art, and philosophy, which she developed at this time. Nor was love abandoned. She shared her heart between the unexacting Duke and a certain César Vischard. It was to the latter that she dictated her memoirs during her stay in Savoy, and as he played for a time a rather important part in her life a word about him will not be amiss.

The Abbé de St. Réal, as he called himself, though never consecrated, was a chevalier d'industrie with a literary bent. Among his works, which had a certain ephemeral popularity, were a romance entitled "Don Carlos," which Schiller afterwards made use of for the stage, and a "Vie de Jésus." But he was best celebrated at the time and remembered now for the profligacy of his career. He may be said to have plumbed the bottomless pit of vice, and some of his letters which were intercepted by the agents of the Minister Louvois, whom Forneron says was a connoisseur in indecency, made even him shudder. Such was the man whom Madame de Mazarin now admitted to the closest intimacy, and with whom, on the sudden death of the Duke, she fled from Savoy to escape the vengeance of the jealous Duchess.

"I learnt on arriving here," wrote from Geneva her whilom friend, the Marquise de Courcelles, with whom she had fallen out before her first flight from France, "that Madame de Mazarin had some days ago gone to Germany, I believe to Augsburg, and that because the Duchess of Savoy, immediately after the death of her husband, had ordered her out of the country. How miserable it must be for her to see herself hunted from place to place! But what is uncommon is that this woman triumphs over disgrace by follies that have no parallel, and that after having tasted shame she thinks only of enjoying herself. When passing through here she was on horseback dressed as a man and with twenty men in her suite, talking only of music and hunting and everything that suggests pleasure."

In such costume and company she arrived at Amsterdam with the lightest of hearts after passing through countries aflame with war. As if she had taken the