“I never mentioned the circumstance to the Queen.  Had I done so, Her Highness would have been forever excluded from the Court and the royal presence.  This was no time to increase the enemies of Her Majesty, and, the affair of the trial being ended, I thought it best to prevent any further breach from a discord between the Court and the house of Conde.  However, from a coldness subsisting ever after between the Princess and myself, I doubt not that the Queen had her suspicions that all was not as it should be in that quarter.  Indeed, though Her Majesty never confessed it, I think she herself had discovered something at that very time not altogether to the credit of the Princesse de Conde, for she ceased going, from that period, to any of the fetes given at Chantilly.

“These were but a small portion of the various instruments successfully levelled by parties, even the least suspected, to blacken and destroy the fair fame of Marie Antoinette.

“The document which so justly alarmed the Princesse de Conde, when I showed it to her came into my hands in the following manner: 

“Whenever a distressed family, or any particular individual, applied to me for relief, or was otherwise recommended for charitable purposes, I generally sent my little English protegee—­whose veracity, well knowing the goodness of her heart, I could rely—­to ascertain whether their claims were really well grounded.

[Indeed, I never deceived the Princess on these occasions.  She was so generously charitable that I should have conceived it a crime.  When I could get no satisfactory information, I said I could not trace anything undeserving her charity, and left Her Highness to exercise her own discretion.]

“One day I received an earnest memorial from a family, desiring to make some private communications of peculiar delicacy.  I sent my usual ambassadress to inquire into its import.  On making her mission known, she found no difficulty in ascertaining the object of the application.  It proceeded from conscientious distress of mind.  A relation of this family had been the regular confessor of a convent.  With the Lady Abbess of this convent and her trusty nuns, the Princesse de Conde had deposited considerable sums of money, to be bestowed in creating influence in favour of the Cardinal de Rohan.  The confessor, being a man of some consideration among the clergy, was applied to, to use his influence with the needier members of the Church more immediately about him, as well as those of higher station, to whom he had access, in furthering the purposes of the Princesse de Conde.  The bribes were applied as intended.  But, at the near approach of death, the confessor was struck with remorse.  He begged his family, without mentioning his name, to send the accounts and vouchers of the sums he had so distributed, to me, as a proof of his contrition, that I might make what use of them I should think proper.  The papers were handed to my messenger, who pledged her word of honour that I would certainly adhere to the dying man’s last injunctions.  She desired they might be sealed up by the family, and by them directed to me.—­[To this day, I neither know the name of the convent or the confessor.]—­She then hastened back to our place of rendezvous, where I waited for her, and where she consigned the packet into my own hands.