When Duke Victor came to the throne, which he did when, six months after, apoplexy carried off the old sovereign his father, all the good old usages of X——­were given up,—­play forbidden; the opera and ballet sent to the right-about; and the regiments which the old Duke had sold recalled from their foreign service:  with them came my Countess’s beggarly cousin the ensign, and he married her.  I don’t know whether they were happy or not.  It is certain that a woman of such a poor spirit did not merit any very high degree of pleasure.

The now reigning Duke of X——­himself married four years after his first wife’s demise, and Geldern, though no longer Police Minister, built the grand house of which Madame de Liliengarten spoke.  What became of the minor actors in the great tragedy, who knows?  Only monsieur de Strasbourg was restored to his duties.  Of the rest—­the Jew, the chamber-woman, the spy on Magny—­I know nothing.  Those sharp tools with which great people cut out their enterprises are generally broken in the using:  nor did I ever hear that their employers had much regard for them in their ruin.

CHAPTER XIII

I CONTINUE MY CAREER AS A MAN OF FASHION

I find I have already filled up many scores of pages, and yet a vast deal of the most interesting portion of my history remains to be told, viz. that which describes my sojourn in the kingdoms of England and Ireland, and the great part I played there; moving among the most illustrious of the land, myself not the least distinguished of the brilliant circle.  In order to give due justice to this portion of my Memoirs, then,—­which is more important than my foreign adventures can be (though I could fill volumes with interesting descriptions of the latter),—­I shall cut short the account of my travels in Europe, and of my success at the Continental Courts, in order to speak of what befell me at home.  Suffice it to say that there is not a capital in Europe, except the beggarly one of Berlin, where the young Chevalier de Balibari was not known and admired; and where he has not made the brave, the high-born, and the beautiful talk of him.  I won 80,000 roubles from Potemkin at the Winter Palace at Petersburg, which the scoundrelly favourite never paid me; I have had the honour of seeing his Royal Highness the Chevalier Charles Edward as drunk as any porter at Rome; my uncle played several matches at billiards against the celebrated Lord C——­at Spa, and I promise you did not come off a loser.  In fact, by a neat stratagem of ours, we raised the laugh against his Lordship, and something a great deal more substantial.  My Lord did not know that the Chevalier Barry had a useless eye; and when, one day, my uncle playfully bet him odds at billiards that he would play him with a patch over one eye, the noble lord, thinking to bite us (he was one of the most desperate gamblers that ever lived), accepted the bet, and we won a very considerable amount of him.