Back again in France, flushed with her triumphs, she purchased a Palace in Paris, and the chateau of Sainte Assize in the country, at which alternately she held her Court, and moved among her courtiers an obese Queen, alternately charming them with her graciousness and shocking them by her profanity and indelicacies.  Here she made her will, leaving most of her jewels to her “dear friend,” the Russian Empress; a large diamond to her equally good friend the Pope; and an extremely valuable pearl necklace and earrings to my Lady Salisbury, for no other reason than that they had been originally worn some centuries earlier by a lady who bore the same title.

But the career of the profligate and eccentric Duchess was nearing its close, and she died as she had lived, game and defiant.  While she was sitting at dinner news came that a lawsuit had been decided against her.  She broke out in a violent passion and burst a blood-vessel.  But, even dying as she was, she refused to remain in bed.  “At your peril, disobey me!” she said to her protesting attendants.  “I will get up!” She got up, dressed, and walked about the room.  Then, calling for wine, she drained glass after glass of Madeira.  “I will lie down on the couch,” she then said.  “I can sleep, and after that I shall be quite well again.”

From that sleep she never awoke.  The maidservants who held her hands felt them grow gradually cold.  The Duchess was dead.  After life’s fitful fever, she had found rest.  Thus died, in the sixty-ninth year of her life Elizabeth, Duchess of Kingston, who had drunk deep of life’s cup of pleasure; who had alternately shocked and dazzled the world; and who had found that the greatest triumphs of her beauty and the most prodigal indulgence of her appetites were “all vanity.”

CHAPTER XVI

THE KING AND THE PRETTY HAYMAKER

If ever woman was born to romance it was surely the Lady Sarah Lennox, whose beauty and witchery nearly won for her a crown as England’s Queen a a century and a half ago; and who, after ostracising herself from Society by a flagrant lapse from virtue, lived to become the mother of heroes, and to end her days in blindness and a tragic loneliness.

There was both passion and a love of adventure in the Lady Sarah’s blood; for had she not for great-grandfather that most fascinating and philandering of monarchs, the second Charles; and for great-grandmother, the lovely and frail Louise Renee de Querouaille, Duchess of Portsmouth, the most seductive of the beautiful trio of women—­the Duchesses of Portsmouth, Morland, and Mazarin—­who spent their days in “open dalliance” with the “Merrie Monarch,” and their nights at the basset-table, winning or losing guineas by the thousand.