To Charles she was coyness itself—­virtue personified.  While smiling graciously on him she kept him at arm’s length, thus adding to her attractions the allurement of an unexpected virtue.  So jealously did she guard her favours that the French Ambassador began to show alarm.

“I believe,” he wrote at this time, “that she has so got round King Charles as to be of the greatest service to our Sovereign lord and master, if she only does her duty.”

That Louise was fully conscious of her duty and meant to do it, was never really in question—­but the time to unbend was not yet.  It was no part of her clever strategy to drop like a ripe plum into Charles’s mouth. Il faut reculer pour mieux sauter. She would be accounted all the greater prize for proving difficult to win.

The psychical moment, she decided, had come when Lord Arlington invited Charles and his Court to his palatial country-seat, Euston, where, removed from censorious eyes and in the abandon of country-house freedom, she could exhibit her true colours to full advantage.  Over the revels of which Euston was 183 the scene during a few intoxicating weeks, it is but decent to draw the curtain.  With such guests as the merry and dissolute Charles, his boon-companions, experts in gallantry, and his ladies, with most of whom an acquaintance with virtue was but a faded memory, it is no difficult matter to raise a corner of the curtain in imagination.  One typical scene Forneron records thus: 

“Lady Arlington, under the pretext of killing the tedium of October evenings in a country-house, got up a burlesque wedding, in which Louise de Querouaille was the bride and the King the bridegroom, with all the immodest ceremonies which marked, in the good old times, the retirement of the former into the nuptial chamber.”

It was precisely such a ceremony in which, a few years earlier, Charles had figured with La belle Stuart, while Lady Castlemaine looked on with laughter and applause.

[Illustration:  LOUISE, DUCHESS OF PORTSMOUTH]

Such was the revolution that resulted from this country visit that Louise de Querouaille returned to Whitehall, the avowed maitresse en titre to the King.  The French maid-of-honour had justified the confidence Louis reposed in her; and as reward she was appointed Lady of the Bedchamber to Catherine, and wore a coronet as Duchess of Portsmouth.  More than this, the delighted Louis raised the wool merchant’s daughter to the proud rank of Duchesse d’Aubigny, in exchange for which dignity she pledged herself to induce Charles to go to war with Holland; to avow himself a Catholic; and to persuade his brother and successor, the Duke of York, to take to wife a Princess of France.