who was in the same company with myself.  He was well instructed and full of wit; was exceedingly rich, and even more idle than rich.  That evening he had invited several of us to supper in his tent.  I went there early, and found him stretched out upon his bed, from which I dislodged him playfully and laid myself down in his place, several of our officers standing by.  Coetquen, sporting with me in return, took his gun, which he thought to be unloaded, and pointed it at me.  But to our great surprise the weapon went off.  Fortunately for me, I was at that moment lying flat upon the bed.  Three balls passed just above my head, and then just above the heads of our two tutors, who were walking outside the tent.  Coetquen fainted at thought of the mischief he might have done, and we had all the pains in the world to bring him to himself again.  Indeed, he did not thoroughly recover for several days.  I relate this as a lesson which ought to teach us never to play with fire-arms.

The poor lad,—­to finish at once all that concerns him,—­did not long survive this incident.  He entered the King’s regiment, and when just upon the point of joining it in the following spring, came to me and said he had had his fortune told by a woman named Du Perehoir, who practised her trade secretly at Paris, and that she had predicted he would be soon drowned.  I rated him soundly for indulging a curiosity so dangerous and so foolish.  A few days after he set out for Amiens.  He found another fortune-teller there, a man, who made the same prediction.  In marching afterwards with the regiment of the King to join the army, he wished to water his horse in the Escaut, and was drowned there, in the presence of the whole regiment, without it being possible to give him any aid.  I felt extreme regret for his loss, which for his friends and his family was irreparable.

But I must go back a little, and speak of two marriages that took place at the commencement of this year the first (most extraordinary) on the 18th February the other a month after.

CHAPTER II.

The King was very anxious to establish his illegitimate children, whom he advanced day by day; and had married two of them, daughters, to Princes of the blood.  One of these, the Princesse de Conti, only daughter of the King and Madame de la Valliere, was a widow without children; the other, eldest daughter of the King and Madame de Montespan, had married Monsieur le Duc (Louis de Bourbon, eldest son of the Prince de Conde).  For some time past Madame de Maintenon, even more than the King, had thought of nothing else than how to raise the remaining illegitimate children, and wished to marry Mademoiselle de Blois (second daughter of the King and of Madame de Montespan) to Monsieur the Duc de Chartres.  The Duc de Chartres was the sole nephew of the King, and was much above the Princes of the blood by his rank of Grandson of France, and by the Court that Monsieur his father kept up.