your page is lying-in.”  She was delivered of a girl, and the mother and child were soon afterwards placed in a convent near Paris.  While the Count lived he took great care of her, but he died in the Morea, and his pretended page did not long survive him; she displayed great piety in the hour of death.  A friend of the Count’s, and a nephew of Madame de Montespan, took care of the child, and after his death the King gave the little creature a pension.  I believe she is still (1717) in the convent.

The Abbe Perrault founded an annual funeral oration for the Prince de Conde in the Jesuits’ Church, where his heart is deposited.  I shall not upon this occasion call to mind his victories, his courage in war, or his timidity at Court; these are things well known throughout France.

A gentleman of my acquaintance at Paris heard a learned Abbe, who was in the confidence of Descartes, say that the philosopher used often to laugh at his own system, and said, “I have cut them out some work:  we shall see who will be fools enough to undertake it.”

That old Beauvais, the Queen-mother’s first femme de chambre, was acquainted with the secret of her marriage, and this obliged the Queen to put up with whatever the confidante chose to do.  From this circumstance has arisen that custom which gives femmes de chambre so much authority in our apartments.  The Queen-mother, the widow of Louis XIII., not contented with loving Cardinal Mazarin, went the absurd length of marrying him.  He was not a priest, and therefore was not prevented by his orders from contracting matrimony.  He soon, however, got very tired of the poor Queen, and treated her dreadfully ill, which is the ordinary result in such marriages.  But it is the vice of the times to contract clandestine marriages.  The Queen-mother of England, the widow of Charles ii., made such an one in marrying her chevalier d’honneur, who behaved very ill to her; while the poor Queen was in want of food and fuel, he had a good fire in his apartment, and was giving great dinners.  He called himself Lord Germain, Earl of St. Albans; he never addressed a kind expression to the Queen.  As to the Queen-mother’s marriage, all the circumstances relating to it are now well enough known.  The secret passage by which he went nightly to the Palais Royal may still be seen; when she used to visit him, he was in the habit of saying, “what does this woman want with me?” He was in love with a lady of the Queen’s suite, whom I knew very well:  she had apartments in the Palais Royal, and was called Madame de Bregie.  As she was very pretty, she excited a good deal of passion; but she was a very honest lady, who served the Queen with great fidelity, and was the cause of the Cardinal’s living upon better terms with the Queen than before.  She had very good sense.  Monsieur loved her for her fidelity to the Queen his mother.  She has been dead now four-and-twenty years (1717).