Save-all a disdainful farewell, removes to the Belle Image in Versailles; there within wind of Court, in attic apartments, on poor water-gruel board, resolves to await what can betide. So much, in few months of this fateful year, 1783, has come and gone.

Poor Jeanne de Saint-Remi de Lamotte Valois, Ex-Mantuamaker, Scion-of-Royalty! What eye, looking into those bare attic apartments and water-gruel platters of the Belle Image, but must, in spite of itself, grow dim with almost a kind of tear for thee! There thou art, with thy quick lively glances, face of a certain piquancy, thy gossamer untamable character, snappish sallies, glib all-managing tongue; thy whole incarnated, garmented, and so sharply appetent spark of Life;' cast down alive into this World, without vote of thine (for the Elective Franchises have not yet got that length); and wouldst so fain live there. Paying scot-andlot; providing, or fresh-scouring silk court-dresses; 'always keeping a gig!' Thou must hawk and shark to and fro, from anteroom to anteroom; become a kind of terror to all men in place, and women that influence such; dance not light Ionic measures, but attendance merely; have weepings, thanksgiving effusions, aulic, almost forensic, eloquence: perhaps eke out thy thin livelihood by some coquetries, in the small way; and so, most poverty-stricken, cold-blighted, yet with young keen blood struggling against it, spin forward thy unequal feeble thread, which the Atropos-scissors will soon clip!

Surely now, if ever, were that vague looming from Saverne welcome, as a weather-sign. How doubly welcome is his plush Eminence's personal arrival; for with the earli est spring he has come in person, as he periodically does; vaporific, driven by his fixed-idea.

Genius, of the mechanical-practical kind, what is it but a bringing together of two Forces that fit each other, that will give birth to a third? Ever, from Tubalcain's time, Iron lay ready hammered; Water, also, was boiling and bursting:

nevertheless, for want of a genius, there was as yet no Steamengine. In his Eminence Prince Louis, in that huge, restless, incoherent Being of his, depend on it, brave Countess, there are Forces deep, manifold; nay, a fixed-idea concentrates the whole huge Incoherence as it were into one Force: cannot the eye of genius discover its fellow?

Communing much with the Court valetaille, our brave Countess has more than once heard talk of Boehmer, of his Necklace, and threatened death by water; in the course of gossiping and tattling, this topic from time to time emerges; is commented upon with empty laughter, as if there lay no farther meaning in it. To the common eye there is indeed none but to the eye of genius? In some moment of inspiration, the question rises on our brave Lamotte: Were not this, of all extant Forces, the cognate one that would unite with Eminence Rohan's? Great moment, light-beaming, fire-flashing; like birth of Minerva; like all moments of Creation! Fancy how pulse and breath flutter, almost stop, in the greatness: the great not Divine Idea, the great Diabolic Idea, is too big for her. Thought (how often must we repeat it?) rules the world. Fire and, in a less degree,

Frost; Earth and Sea (for what is your swiftest ship, or steamship, but a Thought- embodied in wood?); Reformed Parliaments, rise and ruin of Nations, sale of Diamonds :

all things obey Thought. Countess de Saint-Remi de Lamotte, by power of Thought, is now a made woman. With force of genius she represses, crushes deep down, her Undivine Idea; bends all her faculty to realise it. Prepare thyself, Reader, for a series of the most surprising Dramatic Representations ever exhibited on any stage.

We hear tell of Dramatists, and scenic illusion how 'natural,' how illusive it was: if the spectator, for some halfmoment, can half-deceive himself into the belief that it was real, he departs doubly content. With all which, and much more of the like, I have no quarrel. But what must be

thought of the Female Dramatist who, for eighteen long months, can exhibit the beautifullest Fata-morgana to a plush Cardinal, wide awake, with fifty years on his head; and so lap him in her scenic illusion that he never doubts but it is all firm earth, and the pasteboard Coulisse-trees are producing Hesperides apples? Could Madame de Lamotte, then, have written a Hamlet? I conjecture, not. More goes to the writing of a Hamlet than completest 'imitation' of all characters and things in this Earth; there goes, before and beyond all, the rarest understanding of these, insight into their hidden essences and harmonies. Erasmus's Ape, as is known in Literary History, sat by while its Master was shaving, and imitated' every point of the process; but its own foolish beard grew never the smoother.

As in looking at a finished Drama, it were nowise meet that the spectator first of all got behind the scenes, and saw the burnt-corks, brayed-resin, thunder-barrels, and withered hunger-bitten men and women, of which such heroic work was made so here with the reader. A peep into the sidescenes shall be granted him, from time to time. But, on the whole, repress, O reader, that too insatiable scientific curiosity of thine; let thy aesthetic feeling first have play; and witness what a Prospero's-grotto poor Eminence Rohan is led into, to be pleased he knows not why.

Survey first what we might call the stage-lights, orchestra, general structure of the theatre, mood and condition of the audience. The theatre is the World, with its restless business and madness; near at hand rise the royal Domes of Versailles, mystery around them, and as background the memory of a thousand years. By the side of the River Seine walks, haggard, wasted, a Joaillier-Bijoutier de la Reine, with Necklace in his pocket. The audience is a drunk Christopher Sly in the fittest humour. A fixed-idea, driving him headlong over steep places, like that of the Gadarenes' Swine, has produced a deceptibility, as of desperation, that will clutch at straws. Understand one other word:

Cagliostro is prophesying to him! The Quack of Quacks has now for years had him in leading. Transmitting predictions in cipher;' questioning, before Hieroglyphic Screens, Columbs in a state of innocence, for elixirs of life, and philosopher's stone; unveiling, in fuliginous clear-obscure, an imaginary majesty of Nature; he isolates him more and more from all unpossessed men. Was it not enough that poor Rohan had become a dissolute, somnolent-violent, evervapoury Mud-volcano; but black Egyptian magic must be laid on him!

If perhaps, too, our Countess de Lamotte, with her blandishments ? For though not beautiful, she has a certain piquancy' et cetera! — Enough, his poor Eminence sits in the fittest place, in the fittest mood: a newly-awakened Christopher Sly; and with his 'small ale,' too, beside him. Touch, only, the lights with firetipt rod; and let the orchestra, softwarbling, strike up their fara-lara fiddle-diddle-dee!

CHAPTER VII.
Marie-Antoinette.

Such a soft-warbling fara-lara was it to his Eminence, when, in early January of the year 1784, our Countess first, mysteriously, and under seal of sworn secrecy, hinted to him that, with her winning tongue and great talent as Anecdotic Historian, she had worked a passage to the ear of Queen's Majesty itself. Gods! dost thou bring with thee airs from Heaven? Is thy face yet radiant with some reflex of that Brightness beyond bright? - Men with fixed-idea are not as other men. To listen to a plain varnished tale, such as your Dramatist can fashion; to ponder the words; to snuff them up, as Ephraim did the east-wind, and grow flatulent and drunk with them: what else could poor Eminence do? His

1 Compare Rohan's Mémoires pour (there are four of them), in the Affaire du Collier, with Lamotte's four. They go on in the way of controversy, of argument and response.

poor somnolent, so swift-rocked soul feels a new element infused into it; turbid resinous light, wide-coruscating, glares over the waste of his imagination. Is he interested in the mysterious tidings? Hope has seized them; there is in the world nothing else that interests him.

The secret friendship of Queens is not a thing to be let sleep ever new Palace Interviews occur; - yet in deepest privacy; for how should her Majesty awaken so many tongues of Principalities and Nobilities, male and female, that spitefully watch her? Above all, however, 'on the 2d of February,' that day of the Procession of blue Ribands,' much was spoken of: somewhat, too, of Monseigneur de Rohan! - Poor Monseigneur, hadst thou three long ears, thou'dst hear her.

1

But will she not, perhaps, in some future priceless Interview, speak a good word for thee? Thyself shalt speak it, happy Eminence; at least, write it: our tutelary Countess will be the bearer! On the 21st of March goes off that long exculpatory imploratory Letter: it is the first Letter that went off from Cardinal to Queen; to be followed, in time, by above two hundred others;' which are graciously answered by verbal Messages, nay at length by Royal Autographs on gilt paper, the whole delivered by our tutelary Countess.2 The tutelary Countess comes and goes, fetching and carrying; with the gravity of a Roman Augur, inspects those extraordinary chicken-bowls, and draws prognostics from them. Things are in fair train: the Dauphiness took some offence at Monseigneur, but the Queen has nigh forgotten it. No inexorable Queen; ah no! So good, so free, light-hearted; only sore beset with malicious Polignacs and others; at times, also, short of money.

Marie Antoinette, as the reader well knows, has been much

1 Lamotte's Mémoires Justificatifs (London, 1788).

2 See Georgel: see Lamotte's Mémoires; in her Appendix of 'Documents' to that volume, certain of these Letters are given.