who admired her wit and was delighted with her society.  M. de Briou was not then five-and-twenty years of age, a very good-looking and well-bred young man.  His father, however, procured a dissolution of the marriage by the Parliament, and made him marry another person.  Madame de Briou thus became once more Mdlle. de La Force, and found herself without husband and money.  I cannot tell how it was that the King and her parents, both of whom had consented to the marriage, did not oppose its dissolution.  To gain a subsistence she set about composing romances, and as she was often staying with the Princesse de Conti, she dedicated to her that of Queen Margaret.

We have had four Dukes who have bought coffee, stuffs, and even candles for the purpose of selling them again at a profit.  It was the Duke de La Force who bought the candles.  One evening, very recently, as he was going out of the Opera, the staircase was filled with young men, one of whom cried out, as he passed, “His purse!”—­“No,” said another, “there can be no money in it; he would not risk it; it must be candles that he has bought to sell again.”  They then sang the air of the fourth act of ‘Phaeton’.

[The Duke, together with certain other persons, made considerable purchases of spice, porcelain, and other merchandizes, for the purpose of realizing the hope of Law’s Banks.  As he was not held in estimation either by the public or by the Parliament, the Duke was accused of monopoly; and by a decree of the Parliament, in concert with the Peers, he was enjoined “to use more circumspection for the future, and to conduct himself irreproachably, in a manner as should be consistent with his birth and his dignity as a Peer of France.”]

The Queen Catherine (de Medicis) was a very wicked woman.  Her uncle, the Pope, had good reason for saying that he had made a bad present to France.  It is said that she poisoned her youngest son because he had discovered her in a common brothel whither she had gone privately.  Who can wonder that such a woman should drink out of a cup covered with designs from Aretino.  The Pope had an object in sending her to France.  Her son was the Duc d’Alencon; and as they both remained incog. the world did not know that they were mother and son, which occasioned frequent mistakes.

The young Count Horn, who has just been executed here (1720), was descended from a well-known Flemish family; he was distinguished at first for the amiable qualities of his head and for his wit.  At college he was a model for good conduct, application, and purity of morals; but the intimacy which he formed with some libertine young men during his stay at the Academy of Paris entirely changed him.  He contracted an insatiable desire for play, and even his own father said to him, “You will die by the hands of the executioner.”  Being destitute of money, the young Count took up the trade of a pickpocket, which he carried on in the pit of the theatres, and