And to all these grand, disdainful airs Madame Nell only retorted with a Drury Lane peal of silvery laughter.  She, who was accustomed to “chuck Charles’s royal chin,” and to call him her “Charles the third,” in unflattering reference to his two predecessors of the name in her favour, could afford to snap her fingers at the French madame who, after all, was no better than herself.

“The Duchess,” she would say, “pretends to be a person of quality.  She says she is related to the best families in France; and when any great person dies she puts herself in mourning.  If she be a lady of such quality, why does she demean herself to be what she is?  As for me, it’s my profession; I don’t profess to be anything better.  And the King is just as fond of me as he is of his French miss.”

But while Her Grace of Portsmouth was revelling in her splendour and her gold, her mission as Louis’s Ambassadress was making unsatisfactory progress.  However disposed Charles may have been to change his faith to the advantage of his pocket, he was not prepared to risk his crown, possibly his head, for any Pope who ever lived; nor did the project of providing a French bride for his successor, the Duke of York, promise much better.  Louis proposed the Duchess of Guise, his own cousin; but James had heard too much of this unamiable and unattractive Princess from his sister, Henrietta, to relish the venture.  The Duchess herself suggested a Princess of Lorraine, as a suitable bride, but Louis, who had no love for the d’Elboeuf ladies, nipped this project in the bud.

After a long resistance, however, she had induced her Royal lover to declare war on Holland; and Louis professed himself so pleased with this concession to his schemes, that he dazzled her eyes with splendid promises if she would but carry out his programme to the full.  It had become her crowning ambition to win the right to a tabouret at the Court of Versailles—­the highest privilege accorded to the old noblesse, that of sitting on a stool in the presence of the King; and this proud distinction, which would raise her to the highest pinnacle in France, inferior only to the crown itself, could be hers if Louis would but grant her the d’Aubigny lands to accompany her title, for the tabouret went with the Duchy domains.  Even this most coveted of all the gifts in his power Louis promised to the little adventuress if she would but carry out, not only all she had undertaken, but any future commands he might lay upon her.

His immediate object now was to take advantage of the distraction caused by the war between England and Holland to annex the Palatinate and the Franche Comte, on which he had long set covetous eyes; but he quickly discovered that for once his vaulting ambition had overleaped itself.  The whole of Europe took alarm; England to a man rose in angry protest, sworn enemies joining hands to resist such an outrageous aggression; and Charles, in a frenzy of fear for his crown, dismissed his hireling army paid with Louis’s gold.  The proud edifice which the Duchess of Portsmouth had so carefully reared was threatened with a cataclysm of popular rage against the “painted French spy” who was regarded, and perhaps rightly, as a prime instigator of the mischief, and the worst enemy of the country that had given her such generous hospitality.