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no exception, but they cannot persuade us that she was anything but a dear old bore. Her jovial father, Stanislas, said that the dullest queens in Europe were his wife and daughter: ‘When I’m with her I yawn like at Mass.’ The amusing element at Court had always avoided her; now, in the midst of the liveliest society France has ever seen, she was living like a nun. Most of her day was spent in prayer, her only outings being to charitable entertainments or the convent where her unfashionable dresses were embroidered.
    In the morning, between Mass and her state visit to the King, she read some moral tale, or did a little painting, for which her talent was pathetically meagre, as we can see by the example of her work which still remains at Versailles. She dined at 1 p.m., in public, eating enormously. After dinner she sewed for the poor until it was time for cards. Gambling was a great feature of the life at Versailles, enormous sums were won and lost, and everybody spent hours at the tables, even the young princesses. The Queen’s game was cavagnole, played with dice; it had long been out of fashion; comète and piquet were now all the rage. Nothing is so frumpish as last year’s gambling game and the courtiers complained terribly when they were made to play
la triste cavagnole
with the Queen. Two or three times a week her tables were put in the state rooms where the public was admitted, but nobody ever bothered to go and watch. After supper, her evening was given over to social life. Her ladies, who were chosen by the King, because they amused and attracted him, scampered off to his private rooms and she was left with her friends the Duc and Duchesse de Luynes.
    The Duc de Luynes kept a journal in which almost every hour of life in the palace is accounted for. He is not a great writer like Saint-Simon, and three-quarters of his journal, devoted to questions of etiquette and usage, is almost unreadable; but he inspires confidence, he never writes anything of which he is not quite certain, and from time to time, in some anecdote or physical description, his pages come to life. Enormously rich, he and his wife were also close-fisted and dowdy, as is evident from the fact that they did not pull down Dampierre and build a modern château in its place, as almost anybody else would have. Beautiful Dampierre, a jewel of Louis XIII architecture, stands unchanged in its park, and still belongs to the Duc de Luynes. The Queen supped at least every other day with these friends; the Duke noting each year how many times. It was very expensive for them, and she once said to his brother that she really must make it up to them in some way; they waited, hopefully, but in the end only received gracious compliments.
    The other guests at these suppers were always the same: Luynes’ son and daughter-in-law, the Duc and Duchesse de Chevreuse; his brother, the Cardinal de Luynes; Président Hénault, and Moncrif; all, except the Chevreuses, were over sixty. François de Moncrif, whose origins, certainly Scotch, are rather mysterious, was one of those hangers-on who, in all societies and in all ages, manage to create and maintain a position for themselves, for no very evident reason. He must have been extremely cosy. He was the ‘historian of cats’ and it was said that he got on in life by never scratching, having velvet paws, and never putting up his back, even when startled. The Queen thought he was so good as to be almost saintly; she little knew that in the passages of the Opéra hung a notice: ‘If one of the young ladies would care to sup with a nice little old man, she would find ninety-two steps to climb, quite a good supper and could earn ten
louis
.’ The nice little old man was Moncrif; the ninety-two steps led to his lodging in the Louvre, given to him by his friend the Queen. (A
louis
, in those days, was exactly a guinea. The Duc de Luynes says, ‘they give in London a guinea for a
louis
and in Lille a
louis
for a