I cannot finish my list without adding a much more common character—­but more complete in its kind than any of the foregoing, the Mar`echale de Luxembourg.(939) She has been very handsome, very abandoned, and very mischievous.  Her beauty is gone, her lovers are gone, and she thinks the devil is coming.  This dejection has softened her into being rather agreeable, for she has wit and good-breeding; but you would swear, by the restlessness of her person and the horrors she cannot conceal, that she had signed the compact, and expected to be called upon in a week for the performance.

I could add many pictures, but none so remarkable.  In those I send you, there is not a feature bestowed gratis or exaggerated.  For the beauties, of which there are a few considerable, as Mesdames de Brionne, de Monaco, et d’Egmont, they have not yet lost their characters, nor got any.

You must not attribute my intimacy with Paris to curiosity alone.  An accident unlocked the doors for me.  That passe-partout, called the fashion, has made them fly open-and what do you think was that fashion?  I myself.  Yes, like Queen Elinor in the ballad, I sunk at Charing-cross, and have risen in the Fauxbourg St. Germain.  A plaisanterie on Rousseau, whose arrival here in his way to you brought me acquainted with many anecdotes conformable to the idea I had conceived of him, got about, was liked much more than it deserved, spread like wildfire, and made me the subject of conversation.  Rousseau’s devotees were offended.  Madame de Boufflers, with a tone of sentiment, and the accents of lamenting humanity, abused me heartily, and then complained to myself with the utmost softness.  I acted contrition, but had like to have spoiled all, by growing dreadfully tired of a second lecture from the Prince of Conti, who took up the ball, and made himself the hero of a history wherein he had nothing to do.  I listened, did not understand half he said (nor he neither), forgot the rest, said Yes when I should have said No, yawned when I should have smiled, and was very penitent when I should have rejoiced at my pardon.  Madame de Boufflers was more distressed, for he owned twenty times more than I had said:  she frowned and made him signs:  but she had wound up his clack, and there was no stopping it. -The moment she grew angry, the lord of the house grew charmed, and it has been my fault if I am not at the head of a numerous sect:—­but, when I left a triumphant party in England, I did not come hither to be at the head of a fashion.  However, I have been sent for about like an African prince or a learned canary-bird, and was, in particular, carried by force to the Princess of Talmond,(940) the Queen’s cousin, who lives in a charitable apartment in the Luxembourg, and was sitting on a small bed hung with saints and Sobieskis, in a corner of one of those vast chambers, by two blinking tapers.  I stumbled over a cat, a footstool, and a chamber-pot in my journey to her presence.