The Memoirs of Queen Margaret of Navarre are merely a romance compared with those of Mdlle. de La Force.  The authoress’s own life was a romance.  Being extremely poor, although of an ancient and honourable family, she accepted the office of demoiselle d’honneur to the Duchesse de Guise.  Here the Marquis de Nesle, father of the present Marquis (1720), became enamoured of her, after having received from her a small bag to wear about his neck, as a remedy against the vapours.  He would have married her, but his relations opposed this intention on the score of Mdlle. de La Force’s poverty, and because she had improperly quitted the Duchesse de Guise.  The Great Conde, the Marquis de Nesle’s nearest relation, took him to Chattillon that he might forget his love for Mdlle. de La Force; all the Marquis’s relations were there assembled for the purpose of declaring to him that they would never consent to his marriage with Mdlle. de La Force; and he on his part told them that he would never while he lived marry any other person.  In a moment of despair, he rushed out to the garden and would have thrown himself into the canal, but that the strings, with which Mdlle. de La Force had tied the bag about his neck, broke, and the bag fell at his feet.  His thoughts appeared to undergo a sudden change, and Mdlle. de La Force seemed to him to be as ugly as she really is.  He went instantly to the Prince and his other relations who were there, and told them what had just happened.  They searched about in the garden for the bag and the strings, and, opening it, they found it to contain two toads’ feet holding a heart wrapped up in a bat’s wing, and round the whole a paper inscribed with unintelligible cyphers.  The Marquis was seized with horror at the sight.  He told me this story with his own mouth.  Mdlle. de La Force after this fell in love with Baron, but as he was not bewitched, the intrigue did not last long:  he used to give a very amusing account of the declaration she made to him.  Then a M. Briou, the son of a Councillor of that name, became attached to her; his relations, who would by no means have consented to such a marriage, shut the young man up.  La Force, who has a very fertile wit, engaged an itinerant musician who led about dancing bears in the street, and intimated to her lover that, if he would express a wish to see the bears dance in the courtyard of his, own house, she would come to him disguised in a bear’s skin.  She procured a bear’s skin to be made so as to fit her, and went to M. Briou’s house with the bears; the young man, under the pretence of playing with this bear, had an opportunity of conversing with her and of laying their future plans.  He then promised his father that he would submit to his will, and thus having regained his liberty he immediately married Mdlle. de La Force, and went with her to Versailles, where the King gave them apartments, and where Madame de Briou was every day with the Dauphine of Bavaria,