Peregrine did not enter into full details of this stage of his career, and Anne was not fully informed of the habits that the young Duke of Chartres, the future Regent Duke of Orleans, was already developing, but she gathered that, what the young man called his demon, had nearly undisputed sway over him, and she had not spent eight months at St. Germain without knowing by report of the dissolute manners of the substratum of fashionable society at Paris, even though outward decorum had been restored by Madame de Maintenon.  Yet he seemed to have been crossed by fits of vehement penitence, and almost the saddest part of the story was the mocking tone in which he alluded to these.

He had sought service at the Court in the hope of meeting Miss Woodford there, and had been grievously disappointed when he found that she had long since returned to England.  The sight of the gracious and lovely countenance of the exiled Queen seemed always to have moved and touched him, as in some inexplicable manner her eyes and expression recalled to him those of Mrs. Woodford and Anne; but the thought had apparently only stung him into the sense of being forsaken and abandoned to his own devices or those of his evil spirit.

One incident, occurring some three years previously, he told more fully, as it had a considerable effect on his life.  “I was attending the Duke in the gardens at Versailles,” he said, “when we were aware of a great commotion.  All the gentlemen were standing gazing up into the top of a great chestnut tree, the King and all, and in the midst stood the Abbe de Fenelon with his little pupils, the youngest, the Duke of Anjou, sobbing piteously, and the Duke of Burgundy in a furious passion, stamping and raging, and only withheld from rolling on the ground by the Abbe’s hand grasping his shoulder.  ‘I will not have him killed!  He is mine,’ he cried.  And up in the tree, the object of all their gaze, was a monkey with a paper fluttering in his hand.  Some one had made a present of the creature to the King’s grandsons; he was the reigning favourite, and having broken his chain, had effected an entrance by the window into the King’s cabinet, where after giving himself the airs of a minister of state, on being interrupted, he had made off through the window with an important document, which he was affecting to peruse at his leisure, only interrupting himself to hurl down leaves or unripe chestnuts at those who attempted to pelt him with stones, and this only made him mount higher and higher, entirely out of their reach, for no one durst climb after him.  I believe it was a letter from the King of Spain; at any rate the whole Cabinet was in agony lest the brute should proceed to tear it into fragments, and a musqueteer had been sent for to shoot him down.  I remembered my success with the monkey on poor little Madam Archfield’s back—­nay, perhaps ’twas the same, my familiar taking shape.  I threw myself at the King’s feet, and desired