the black thoughts which gathered in his mind, he repeated Aves and Credos; he walked in processions; sometimes he starved himself; sometimes he whipped himself.  At length a complication of maladies completed the ruin of all his faculties.  His stomach failed; nor was this strange; for in him the malformation of the jaw, characteristic of his family, was so serious that he could not masticate his food; and he was in the habit of swallowing ollas and sweetmeats in the state in which they were set before him.  While suffering from indigestion he was attacked by ague.  Every third day his convulsive tremblings, his dejection, his fits of wandering, seemed to indicate the approach of dissolution.  His misery was increased by the knowledge that every body was calculating how long he had to live, and wondering what would become of his kingdoms when he should be dead.  The stately dignitaries of his household, the physicians who ministered to his diseased body, the divines whose business was to soothe his not less diseased mind, the very wife who should have been intent on those gentle offices by which female tenderness can alleviate even the misery of hopeless decay, were all thinking of the new world which was to commence with his death, and would have been perfectly willing to see him in the hands of the embalmer if they could have been certain that his successor would be the prince whose interest they espoused.  As yet the party of the Emperor seemed to predominate.  Charles had a faint sort of preference for the House of Austria, which was his own house, and a faint sort of antipathy to the House of Bourbon, with which he had been quarrelling, he did not well know why, ever since he could remember.  His Queen, whom he did not love, but of whom he stood greatly in awe, was devoted to the interests of her kinsman the Emperor; and with her was closely leagued the Count of Melgar, Hereditary Admiral of Castile and Prime Minister.

Such was the state of the question of the Spanish succession at the time when Portland had his first public audience at Versailles.  The French ministers were certain that he must be constantly thinking about that question, and were therefore perplexed by his evident determination to say nothing about it.  They watched his lips in the hope that he would at least let fall some unguarded word indicating the hopes or fears entertained by the English and Dutch Governments.  But Portland was not a man out of whom much was to be got in that way.  Nature and habit cooperating had made him the best keeper of secrets in Europe.  Lewis therefore directed Pomponne and Torcy, two ministers of eminent ability, who had, under himself, the chief direction of foreign affairs, to introduce the subject which the discreet confidant of William seemed studiously to avoid.  Pomponne and Torcy accordingly repaired to the English embassy; and there opened one of the most remarkable negotiations recorded in the annals of European diplomacy.