“I found her,” Barillon wrote to Louis, “overcome with grief.  But, instead of bewailing her own unhappy and changed condition, she led me into an adjoining chamber and said:  ’M. l’Ambassadeur, I want to confide a secret to you, although if it were publicly known my head would pay the forfeit.  The King is a Catholic at heart, and yet there he lies surrounded by Protestant bishops.  I dare not enter the room, and there is no one to talk to him of his end and of God.  The Duke of York is too much occupied with his own affairs to trouble about his brother’s conscience.  Pray go to him and tell him that the end is near, and that it is his duty to lose no time in saving his brother’s soul.’”

The remainder of the Duchess’s life-story is soon told.  The days of her queendom and glory were at an end.  She was glad to escape to France before James’s tempestuous reign ended in tragedy.  Here trouble and loss were largely her portion.  She lost favour with Louis to such an extent that, at one time, he seriously thought of exiling her; her son deserted and disgraced her; her ill-gotten riches took wings, until only a pension of L800, wrung from Louis, saved her from absolute destitution.  True, she was still able to claim her tabouret at the Court of Versailles, and, for a few hours occasionally, to revive the glories of the past; but apart from these ironical spasms of splendour she spent her last years in loneliness and sadness, turning to a tardy piety as a refuge from the coldness of the world, and as a solace for its lost vanities.  She saw all the great figures, among whom she had moved, pass one by one behind the veil before she died, a wrinkled hag of eighty-five, shorn of the last vestige of the charms which had wrought such havoc in the world.

CHAPTER XV

THE MERRY DUCHESS

When Elizabeth Chudleigh first opened her eyes on the world, nearly two centuries ago, at the Royal Hospital, Chelsea, of which her father was Deputy-Governor, we may be sure that her parents little anticipated the romantic and adventurous role Fate had assigned to her on the stage of life.  A member of an ancient family, whose women had ever been distinguished for their virtue as its men for their valour, the Chelsea infant was destined to shock Society by the laxity of her morals as she dazzled it by her beauty and charm, and to make herself conspicuous, in an age none too strait-laced, as an adventuress of rare skill and daring, and as a profligate in petticoats.

As a child she amused all who knew her by the airs she assumed.  Before she was long out of the nursery she vowed that “she would be a Duchess,” and a Duchess she was before she died.  She was quick to learn the power of beauty and of a clever tongue; and before she was emancipated from short frocks she was a finished coquette.