Before the Duke could be raised from the ground to which he had fallen, he had drawn his last breath.  A few moments later Mohun, too, succumbed to his wounds—­the “Dog Mohun,” as Swift called him, lying in death but a few yards from his victim.

     “I am infinitely concerned,” Swift wrote the same day,
     “for the poor Duke, who was an honest, good-natured man. 
     I loved him very well, and I think he loved me better.”

Thus, steeped in innocent blood, perished Charles Lord Mohun, who well earned his unenviable title, “The wicked Baron.”

CHAPTER XIV

A FAIR INTRIGANTE

The face of a baby, the heart of a courtesan, and the brain of a diplomatist.  Such was Louise de Querouaille who, two centuries and a half ago, came to England to barter her charms for a King’s dishonour, and, incidentally, to found a ducal house as a memorial to her allurements and her shame.

If she had been taken at her own estimate Louise was at least the equal in lineage of any of the proud beauties whose claim she thus challenged to Charles II.’s favour.  She had behind her, she said, centuries of noble ancestors, among the greatest in France; and she was kin, near or remote, to every great name in the land of her birth.  All, however, that is known of this Queen of intrigantes is that she had for father a worthy, unassuming Breton merchant, who had made a sufficient fortune in the wool-trade to take his ease, as a country gentleman, for the latter part of his days, and whose only ambition was to bring up his son and two daughters respectably, and to dispense a modest hospitality among his neighbours.  It was at Brest that Evelyn enjoyed this hospitality for a brief period; and the diarist has nothing but what is good to say of the retired tradesman.

But the worthy merchant had his hands full with one at least of his two daughters, who was developing dangerous fascinations, and with them a precocious knowledge of how to turn them to account.  He was thankful to pack Louise off to a boarding-school, where she seems to have led her teachers such a dance that it became necessary to place her in stronger hands; and with this view the foolish father sent her to Paris, the last place in the world for such a charming and designing minx, and to the custody of a weak-willed aunt.

Nothing could have suited Louise better than this change of arena for the exercise of her wilfulness and witchery.  Before she had been many days in the French capital she was able to twist her aunt round her little finger—­indeed her power of captivating was, to the end of her life, her chief dower—­and to obtain all the freedom she wanted.  And it was not long before her allurements won the admiration of the dissolute Duc de Beaufort, High Admiral of France, a man skilled in all the arts of love.  The girl’s bourgeois head was completely turned by the splendour of her first captive; and, to make him secure, she counted no sacrifice too great.  Not, indeed, that she ever regarded her virtue as anything but the principal piece she intended to play on the chessboard of life.