Cavoye had many times been promised an appointment, but had never received one such as he wished.  The office of Grand Marechal des Logis had just become vacant:  the King offered it to Cavoye, but on condition that he should marry Mademoiselle Coetlogon.  Cavoye sniffed a little longer, but was obliged to submit to this condition at last.  They were married, and she has still the same admiration for him, and it is sometimes fine fun to see the caresses she gives him before all the world, and the constrained gravity with which he receives them.  The history of Cavoye would fill a volume, but this I have selected suffices for its singularity, which assuredly is without example.

About this time the King of England thought matters were ripe for an attempt to reinstate himself upon the throne.  The Duke of Berwick had been secretly into England, where he narrowly escaped being arrested, and upon his report these hopes were built.  Great preparations were made, but they came to nothing, as was always the case with the projects of this unhappy prince.

Madame de Guise died at this time.  Her father was the brother of Louis XIII., and she, humpbacked and deformed to excess, had married the last Duc de Guise, rather than not marry at all.  During all their lives, she compelled him to pay her all the deference due to her rank.  At table he stood while she unfolded her napkin and seated herself, and did not sit until she told him to do so, and then at the end of the table.  This form was observed every day of their lives.  She was equally severe in such matters of etiquette with all the rest of the world.  She would keep her diocesan, the Bishop of Seez, standing for entire hours, while she was seated in her arm-chair and never once offered him a seat even in the corner.  She was in other things an entirely good and sensible woman.  Not until after her death was it discovered that she had been afflicted for a long time with a cancer, which appeared as though about to burst.  God spared her this pain.

We lost, in the month of March, Madame de Miramion, aged sixty-six.  She was a bourgeoise, married, and in the same year became a widow very rich, young, and beautiful.  Bussy Rabutin, so known by his ’Histoire Amoureuse des Gaules’, and by the profound disgrace it drew upon him, and still more by the vanity of his mind and the baseness of his heart, wished absolutely to marry her, and actually carried her off to a chateau.  Upon arriving at the place, she pronounced before everybody assembled there a vow of chastity, and then dared Bussy to do his worst.  He, strangely discomfited by this action, at once set her at liberty, and tried to accommodate the affair.  From that moment she devoted herself entirely, to works of piety, and was much esteemed by the King.  She was the first woman of her condition who wrote above her door, “Hotel de Nesmond.”  Everybody cried out, and was scandalised, but the writing remained, and became the example and the father of those of all kinds which little by little have inundated Paris.