on the same occasion, should or should not salute the Queen-mother; who, on any given occasion, should have a tabouret, who a pliant, who a chair, who an arm-chair; who should enter the King’s ruelle, or her own, or pass out by the private stairway; how she should arrange the duchesses at state-funerals:  these were the things which tried Mademoiselle’s soul, and these fill the later volumes of that autobiography whose earlier record was all a battle and a march.  From Conde’s “Obey Mademoiselle’s orders as my own,” we come down to this:  “For my part, I had been worrying myself all day; having been told that the new Queen would not salute me on the lips, and that the King had decided to sustain her in this position.  I therefore spoke to Monsieur the Cardinal on the subject, bringing forward as an important precedent in my favor, that the Queen-mother had always kissed the princesses of the blood”; and so on through many pages.  Thus lapsed her youth of frolics into an old age of cards.

It is a slight compensation, that this very pettiness makes her chronicles of the age very vivid in details.  How she revels in the silver brocades, the violet-colored velvet robes, the crimson velvet carpets, the purple damask curtains fringed with gold and silver, the embroidered fleurs de lis, the wedding-caskets, the cordons of diamonds, the clusters of emeralds en poires with diamonds, and the Isabelle-colored linen, whereby hangs a tale!  She still kept up her youthful habit of avoiding the sick-rooms of her kindred, but how magnificently she mourned them when they died!  Her brief, genuine, but quite unexpected sorrow for her father was speedily assuaged by the opportunity it gave her to introduce the fashion of gray mourning, instead of black; it had previously, it seems, been worn by widows only.  Servants and horses were all put in deep black, however, and “the court observed that I was very magnifique in all my arrangements.”  On the other hand, be it recorded, that our Mademoiselle, chivalrous royalist to the last, was the only person at the French court who refused to wear mourning for the usurper Cromwell!

But, if thus addicted to funeral pageants, it is needless to say that weddings occupied their full proportion of her thoughts.  Her schemes for matrimony fill the larger portion of her history, and are, like all the rest, a diamond necklace of great names.  In the boudoir, as in the field, her campaigns were superb, but she was cheated of the results.  Her picture should have been painted, like that of Justice, with sword and scales,—­ the one for foes, the other for lovers.  She spent her life in weighing them,—­monarch against monarch, a king in hand against an emperor in the bush.  We have it on her own authority, which, in such matters, was unsurpassable, that she was “the best match in Europe, except the Infanta of Spain.”  Not a marriageable prince in Christendom, therefore, can