monster of greatness and of fortune should be carried to the Escurial.  This was crowning the glory of M. de Vendome in good earnest; for no private persons are buried in the Escurial, although several are to be found in Saint-Denis.  But meanwhile, until I speak of the visit I made to the Escurial—­I shall do so if I live long enough to carry these memoirs up to the death of M. d’Orleans,—­let me say something of that illustrious sepulchre.

The Pantheon is the place where only the bodies of kings and queens who have had posterity are admitted.  In a separate place, near, though not on the same floor, and resembling a library, the bodies of children, and of queens who have had no posterity, are ranged.  A third place, a sort of antechamber to the last named, is rightly called “the rotting room;” whilst the other improperly bears the same name.  In whilst third room, there is nothing to be seen but four bare walls and a table in the middle.  The walls being very thick, openings are made in them in which the bodies are placed.  Each body has an opening to itself, which is afterwards walled up, so that nothing is seen.  When it is thought that the corpse has been closed up sufficiently long to be free from odour the wall is opened, the body taken out, and put in a coffin which allows a portion of it to be seen towards the feet.  This coffin is covered with a rich stuff and carried into an adjoining room.

The body of the Duc de Vendome had been walled up nine years when I entered the Escurial.  I was shown the place it occupied, smooth like every part of the four walls and without mark.  I gently asked the monks who did me the honours of the place, when the body would be removed to the other chamber.  They would not satisfy my curiosity, showed some indignation, and plainly intimated that this removal was not dreamt of, and that as M. de Vendome had been so carefully walled up he might remain so!

Harlay, formerly chief-president, of whom I have so often had occasion to speak, died a short time after M. de Vendome.  I have already made him known.  I will simply add an account of the humiliation to which this haughty cynic was reduced.  He hired a house in the Rue de l’Universite with a partition wall between his garden and that of the Jacobins of the Faubourg Saint-Germain.  The house did not belong to the Jacobins, like the houses of the Rue Saint-Dominique, and the Rue du Bac, which, in order that they might command higher rents, were put in connection with the convent garden.  These mendicant Jacobins thus derive fifty thousand livres a-year.  Harlay, accustomed to exercise authority, asked them for a door into their garden.  He was refused.  He insisted, had them spoken to, and succeeded no better.  Nevertheless the Jacobins comprehended that although this magistrate, recently so powerful, was now nothing by himself, he had a son and a cousin, Councillors of State, whom they might some day have