whose betrothal to the King of France had but lately caused so much joy, was about to be sent away from the court of her royal spouse.  “The Infanta must be started off, and by coach too, to get it over sooner,” exclaimed Count Morville, who had been ordered by Madame de Prie to draw up a list of the marriageable princesses in Europe.  Their number amounted to ninety-nine; twenty-five Catholics, three Anglicans, thirteen Calvinists, fifty-five Lutherans, and three Greeks.  The Infanta had already started for Madrid; the Regent’s two daughters, the young widow of Louis I. and Mdlle. de Beaujolais, promised to Don Carlos, were on their way back to France; the advisers of Louis XV. were still looking out for a wife for him.  Spain had been mortally offended, without the duke’s having yet seen his way to forming a new alliance in place of that which he had just broken off.  Some attempts at arrangement with George I. had failed; an English princess could not abjure Protestantism.  Such scruples did not stop Catherine I., widow of Peter the Great, who had taken the power into her own hands to the detriment of the czar’s grandson; she offered the duke her second daughter, the grand-duchess Elizabeth, for King Louis XV., with a promise of abjuration on the part of the princess, and of a treaty which should secure the support of all the Muscovite forces in the interest of France.  At the same time the same negotiators proposed to the Duke of Bourbon himself the hand of Mary Leckzinska, daughter of Stanislaus, the dispossessed King of Poland, guaranteeing to him, on the death of King Augustus, the crown of that kingdom.

[Illustration:  Mary Leczinska——­121]

The proposals of Russia were rejected.  “The Princess of Muscovy,” M. de Morville had lately said, “is the daughter of a low-born mother, and has been brought up amidst a still barbarous people.”  Every great alliance appeared impossible; the duke and Madame de Prie were looking out for a queen who would belong to them, and would secure them the king’s heart.  Their choice fell upon Mary Leckzinska, a good, gentle, simple creature, without wit or beauty, twenty-two years old, and living upon the alms of France with her parents, exiles and refugees at an old commandery of the Templars at Weissenburg.  Before this King Stanislaus had conceived the idea of marrying his daughter to Count d’Estrees; the marriage had failed through the Regent’s refusal to make the young lord a duke and peer.  The distress of Stanislaus, his constant begging letters to the court of France, were warrant for the modest submissiveness of the princess.  “Madame de Prie has engaged a queen, as I might engage a valet to-morrow,” writes Marquis d’Argenson;—­it is a pity.”

When the first overtures from the duke arrived at Weissenburg, King Stanislaus entered the room where his wife and daughter were at work, and, “Fall we on our knees, and thank God!” he said.  “My dear father,” exclaimed the princess, “can you be recalled to the throne of Poland?” “God has done us a more astounding grace,” replied Stanislaus:  “you are Queen of France!”