The voice, that of a man still in the prime of life, but already raucous in its tone, thickened through constant mirthless laughter, rendered querulous too from long vigils kept at the shrine of pleasure, rose above the incessant babel of women's chatter, the din of silver, china and glasses passing to and fro.

"Your commands, sire?"

M. le Duc d'Aumont, Marshal of France, prime and sole responsible Minister of Louis the Well-beloved, leant slightly forward, with elbows resting on the table, and delicate hands, with fingers interlaced, white and carefully tended as those of a pretty woman, supporting his round and somewhat fleshy chin.

A handsome man M. le Duc, still on the right side of fifty, courtly and pleasant-mannered to all. Has not Boucher immortalized the good-natured, rather weak face, with that perpetual smile of unruffled amiability forever lurking round the corners of the full-lipped mouth?

"Your commands, sire?"

[Pg 4]His eyes—gray and prominent—roamed with a rapid movement of enquiry from the face of the king to that of a young man with fair, curly hair, worn free from powder, and eyes restless and blue, which stared moodily into a goblet full of wine.

[Pg 4]

There was a momentary silence in the vast and magnificent dining hall, that sudden hush which—so the superstitious aver—descends three times on every assembly, however gay, however brilliant or thoughtless: the hush which to the imaginative mind suggests the flutter of unseen wings.

Then the silence was broken by loud laughter from the King.

"They are mad, these English, my friend! What?" said Louis the Well-beloved with a knowing wink directed at the fair-haired young man who sat not far from him.

"Mad, indeed, sire?" replied the Duke. "But surely not more conspicuously so to-night than at any other time?"

"Of a truth, a hundred thousand times more so," here interposed a somewhat shrill feminine voice—"and that by the most rigid rules of brain-splitting arithmetic!"

Everyone listened. Conversations were interrupted; glasses were put down; eager, attentive faces turned toward the speaker; this was no less a personage than Jeanne Poisson now Marquise de Pompadour; and when she opened her pretty 

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