Forest Hill, he asked: "What hotel do you
stop at in London?"  I replied that I was
going to stay with a friend. He offered to
set me down at that friend's door. " But," I
said, "you may be destined for quite another
part of London:" and mentioned my
destination. Strangely enough he was going to
the same neighbourhood. Then, after a
few more words of explanation, the coincidence
became perfect. He and I were
actually invited, and were unconsciously on
our road to the same house. When we
arrived, our hostess was amazed to see that
her two guests (only one of whom she had
expected that day) had arrived together.

A FRENCH PEPYS.

AT the close of the seventeenth century,
a young, sharp-witted, pragmatical nobleman,
entered on his career at the court of the
Grand Monarque. He was the Duc de Saint
Simon, son of a favourite of Louis the
Thirteenth, and the Samuel Pepys of his time.
He made himself the chronicler and general
portrait-painter of the court; thus bequeathing
a gallery of likenesses, and a bead-roll
of events, which graver history would not
have preserved; but we cannot say that they
increase our respect for the boasted Augustan
era of France.

One of Louis the Fourteenth's great desires
was, to provide brilliantly for his natural
children. The only daughter of
Mademoiselle de la Vallière he had married to
the Prince de Conti. His eldest daughter by
Madame de Montespan, he had given to
Louis de Bourbon, son of the Prince de
Condé, grandson of the Great Condé, and,
like the Prince de Conti, one of the Royal
Princes of France. His second daughter,
by the same mother, he now determined to
marry to his nephew the young Duc de
Chartres, son of Monsieur, his brother, and
the future famous Regent Duc d'Orléans.
The mother of the young De Chartres—a
proud, rigid, and violent woman, holding in
horror all unauthorised relations—received
the proposition with fury. The young Duc,
influenced by his tutor, the celebrated Cardinal
Dubois, and awed by the terrifying majesty
of the king, gave way; although he hated
this projected marriage with Mademoiselle
Dubois, as she was called, quite as much as
his mother herself. But the king knew what
a set of slaves he had to deal with, and cared
nothing for private prejudices. One evening,
therefore, all these personages were sent for
to the king's private cabinet; the court on
the tip-toe of expectation to know what was
afoot. When they returned, the marriage
was announced as a settled thing.
Madame was furious, Monsieur was oppressed
with shame, the young Duc was miserable,
and Mademoiselle Dubois embarrassed and
trembling. Madame strode in the gallery with
her handkerchief in her hand, gesticulating
vehemently and weeping passionately as she
spoke, for all to hear, of the insult and
wrong done to them. At supper she and
her son ate nothing. The son's eyes were
red, the father's downcast, while indignant
tears fell hot and heavy from Madame's.
The king was oppressively polite to Madame,
He offered her every dish before him, all
of which she refused with rudeness. When
they rose from table his Majesty made the
indignant mother a low bow, during which
she performed so complete a pirouette,
that the king, on raising his head, found
nothing but her back before him. The next
day, when the court was assembled in the
gallery, waiting for the breaking up of the
council, the Duc de Chartres went as usual
to kiss his mother's hand; but she gave him
such a sounding box on the ear that he was
sent reeling backward. This was one of the
courtly amenities of that age of bows and
forms.

The household of the new Duchesse is next
declared; and, to the scandal of all the right-
minded—Saint Simon of the number—certain
offices are created in it, hitherto reserved
for the lawful daughters of France. That
innovation was worse than a thousand regal
crimes. The marriage day arrives. After
a ball, a supper, and the midnight marriage
ceremony, the young couple are conducted
to their apartment, and there, in the midst
of the full court, receive their respective night-
garments by a fixed succession of hands; she,
from the banished Queen of England (James
the Second's Queen), he from Louis himself.
And then the massive state bed—with its
plumes and its gilded Cupids, its velvet
hangings, laced sheets, and gold embroidered
counterpane—is solemnly blessed by the
Cardinal de Bouillon, who keeps them shivering
in their scanty clothing a full quarter of an
hour before he deigns to make his appearance.
Then the courtly crowd bows and
trips and minces back to the ball-room,
there to dance minuets and branles until the
morning.

The Princesse de Conti is in love with
Clermont, a subaltern of the guards.
Monseigneur (his Majesty's son) is in love with La
Choin, one of the Princesse's maids of
honour, "a great, ugly, brown, thick-set girl."
Clermont is De Luxembourg's creature, and De
Luxembourg desires to govern Monseigneur.
He therefore proposes to Clermont that he
should abandon the princess and marry
La Choin, by this time the acknowledged
mistress of Monseigneur; whereby she, by
her unlimited power over the future king,
might make Clermont's fortune and
further De Luxembourg's designs. But the
king finds out the whole affair, and the
bombshell bursts. Clermont has sent to
La Choin all the love-letters written to him
by the princess. That, together with those
of the two plotters to each other (wherein
Monseigneur is always called "our fat friend"),