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supped with her every night, but this was really from habit; she had been the inseparable companion of Madame de Châteauroux. The Duc de Richelieu was known to support her candidature; he also had one or two other duchesses up his sleeve, and his influence with the King in these matters was great.
    Meanwhile every pretty woman in the lle de France nurtured a secret conviction that she would carry off the prize. Such was the prestige of a monarch in those days, so nearly was he considered as a god, that very little shame attached to the positon of his mistress, while the material advantages to her family were enormous. The monstrous fortunes of the Gramont, Mortemart, La Vallière and d’Estrées families were founded upon such relationships with various kings. The Queen having settled into a dreary little life with her unfashionable friends, gaiety and amusement centred on the King’s set and was led by his mistress. Besides all this, Louis XV was extremely attractive. He was tall and handsome, he had a most caressing look, a curious husky voice which nobody ever forgot who had once heard it, and a sexy moodiness of manner irresistible to women; the haughty air, which came in reality from shyness, in no way detracted from his charm. The wives of his subjects had no difficulty in falling in love with him, and Madame d’Etioles was not the only one who had done so. It was put about in Paris that he was tired of aristocratic mistresses, with their political ambitions and their grasping families; the bourgeoises were one and all agog.
    But how to meet him? This was indeed a problem. True he often went, masked, to the public balls, both in Paris and in the town of Versailles. It was a pastime of which he was uncommonly fond, but the moment his identity was known, as it always was because of the way he carried his head and the unmistakable timbre of his voice, he would be mobbed; nobody could have a private word with him after that. A possible way would be an introduction through one of his body servants. These men, whose functions were handed down from father to son, whose families always ended by being ennobled, and who themselves employed between ten and twenty servants, were very important in the palace hierarchy. In some respects they had more influence with the King than any of his courtiers; he confided many things to them and was very fond of them. Madame d’Etioles had a distant cousin, one Binet, who was body servant to the Dauphin and who often, in the course of his duties, saw the King alone; no doubt she was in touch with him, but for the moment she did not make use of him.
    At this juncture there were signs that the King would have liked to reform, and go back to the Queen. The Metz affair had not failed to make an impression on him; he was devoted to his daughters, growing up apace, and had no wish to offer a bad example to them, or to the Dauphin, who was nearly sixteen and just about to be married. Mesdames de Vintimille and Châteauroux had been extremely grasping, and had made themselves obnoxious to the Queen who, though most long-suffering as a rule, had once turned to Madame de Vintimille, when she asked for some favour, with ‘You are the mistress here, Madame.’ The King hated this sort of incident; it embarrassed him and he hated being embarrassed. But he also hated being bored, and if he had ever seriously considered a return to conjugal life, one look at the Queen’s existence must have made him realize that it would be more than he could bear.
    Marie Leczinska was said by her intimates to be not only very good but also very amusing. They said that she had a noble mouth but a malicious eye, and hinted that, when her devotions were finished, she kept her friends in a perpetual roar of laughter. We must beg leave to doubt it. People lucky enough to belong to the circle of royal personages are fond of letting it be understood that they are less dull than they look; the friends of Marie Leczinska were