class="x-ebookmaker-pageno" title="[45]"/> Now began for the Duchesse the happiest and most brilliant period of her life. It lasted for the rest of the reign, during which, basking in the favour of the King and the Royal Family, and worshipped by the young Countess of Sussex, Charles's daughter by the Duchess of Cleveland, she gave herself up to a life of pleasure. The consideration she enjoyed gave her great influence, which, as she detested politics, she made no use of save to increase her credit with the tradespeople. At first she did not feel the chain of debt to which she was fastened. Courtin wrote to Louvois, "If you had seen her dancing the furlano to the music of a guitar, which she thrummed herself, you would have been captivated." To which Louvois replied, "If I were at the English Court, I am sure that all I should do would be to feast my eyes on Madame de Mazarin"—a curious sidelight on despatches of State of that day, considering, as Forneron says, that "the only serious man at Whitehall was the French Ambassador."

The taste that she had developed during her stay in Savoy for art and letters was now assiduously cultivated. Like a true femme galante of the seventeenth century, she coloured her very frivolities with an air of culture. But in the case of the Duchesse de Mazarin the cult of learning was not altogether an affectation by means of which she sought to gain the respect she had lost. She was an omnivorous reader, especially of philosophic works, and very fond of discussing what she read. If intellectually superficial, she was a brilliant conversationalist, and had the art of so disguising her thefts from the brains of the clever men whose society she really enjoyed that they were undiscovered. She could not write, but she could talk. In her salon, one of the first of the kind in England, all manner of subjects were discussed: philosophy, religion, history, wit, gallantry, the stage, music, art, ancient and modern literature. The use of the word "Vast" once gave rise to a controversy that was finally settled by an appeal to the French Academy. Intellectuality was the frame in which she set pleasure; for she still continued her life of aristocratic harlotry, and was sometimes among the number, from duchesses to demi-reps, that Chiffinch, the vicious but amusing concièrge of the back-stairs of Whitehall, smuggled of nights into the royal bedchamber. But these blots on her spiritual life, which possibly in our times in the case of such a woman might be excused by the words, "artistic temperament," required no excuse at all then. Moreover, Madame de Mazarin kept a good table and an open house—two means of silencing scandal that are not yet ineffective.

Among the men of distinction who comprised her little court were: the poet Waller, "who had visited several Courts and was at home in none"; Vossius, the sceptic prebendary of Windsor, "understanding most European languages and speaking none well, possessing a profound knowledge of the manners and customs of the ancients, but entirely ignorant of those of his contemporaries, talking as if he were commenting on Juvenal or Petronius, and at the very time he was writing books to prove the Divine inspiration of the Septuagint, intimating privately at Madame de Mazarin's that he believed in no revelation at all"; my Lord Rochester, who needs no description; the respectable Justel, whose Huguenot faith had made him an exile; and last, but not least, St. Evremond.