laughing eyes showing signs of the night carousals, which were the rest from the prodigious toil of this vital and forthright spirit.

It was in this our artist’s fortieth year that the gifted old Cardinal Fleury, who had guided the fortunes of France with rare skill, died, broken by his ninety years and the blunders of the disastrous war that he had so strenuously opposed; and Louis, essaying the strut of kingship, became king by act. His indolent character, unequal to the mighty business, his indeterminate will fretted by the set of quarrelling and intriguing rogues that he gathered about him as his ministers, he fell into the habit that became his thenceforth, the only thing to which he paid the tribute of constancy—he ruled France from behind pretty petticoats. He had early shown the adulterous blood of his great-grandfather; two, if not three, of five sisters of the noble and historic house of De Nesle had yielded to his gadding fancy; the youngest now ousted her sister De Mailly from the king’s favour, was publicly acknowledged as the king’s mistress, and became Duchess of Châteauroux. Boucher painted her handsome being as a shepherdess in one of his pastorals. She was no ordinary toy of a king. A woman of talent, with hot ambitions for the king’s majesty, fired with the pride of race of the old French noblesse, it was during her short years of ascendancy over the king that he roused from his body’s torpor and made an effort to reach the dignity and eminence befitting to the lord of a great and gallant people. He stepped forth awhile from his drunken bouts and manifold mean adulteries, and set himself at the head of the army in Flanders, and strutted it as conqueror. Poor Châteauroux only got the hate of the people for reward, Louis the honours; for the people resented the public dishonour of her state. Power she found to be a dead-sea apple in her pretty mouth. The glory of it all, the splendours, were not the easily won delights for which she had looked. She had to fight a duel, that never ended, with the king’s witty, crafty, and scurrilous Prime Minister, the notorious Maurepas—and Maurepas willed that no woman should ever come between him and the king—Maurepas who knew no mercy, no decency, no chivalry, no scruple. At Châteauroux’s urging, Louis placed himself at the head of the army; and France went near mad with joy that she had again found a king. Crafty Maurepas urged on the business; the Châteauroux suddenly realised his cunning glee—it separated her from the king.