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One Sieur d'Aubigny, a kind of household steward whom she had promoted to be her equerry, was lodged in the Retiro palace near the apartments of her women, where he was seen one day brushing his teeth very unconcernedly at the window. C'était un beau et grand drôle très-bien fait et très-découplé de corps et d'esprit, and not a bête brute, as Louville calls him.
"But, Mariana! he's only a student, of no birth, no family, and he is younger than you are!" What do you see in him? He is only an empty-headed boy." "That was not always your opinion of him, Valentina Mihailovna." "For heaven's sake leave me out of the question, my dear!... Pas tant d'esprit que ca, je vous prie. The thing concerns you and your future. Just consider for a moment.
It was a sarcastic pleasantry at the expense of Mazarin and the Paix des Pyrénées, St. Évremond was a soldier, a wit, and the leader of fashion; Colbert hated him, and magnified a jeu d'esprit into a State-crime. He was exiled, and spent the rest of his long life in England. Of the baser sort, hundreds were turned out of their places and thrown penniless upon the world.
She wore a picture frock of point d'esprit and tiny pink rosebuds, and little pink socks and sandals. "Come out on the Carp Pond," he muttered, picking her up and stuffing her in his pocket. "Nobody will see us." He seated her in the stern of a shallop and took the golden oars. Three of his long sweeping strokes took them a mile up stream and they drifted back.
That such a lusty juvenile will, by favor of the mellowing effect imposed on all creeds by early years of toil, trouble and experience, reach a middle age of presentable decency, is not a more unlikely supposition than the worthy Vermont clergyman would have pronounced, half a century ago, the idea that his jeu d'esprit would become the Bible of sixty thousand industrious, well-ordered English-speaking people in the heart of the American continent.
Compare "Hints to Transcendentalists for Working Infidel Designs through Tractarianism," a jeu d'esprit , ib. p. 188. "As for the suspicion of secret infidelity, I have said no more than I sincerely feel," ib. p. 181. Apologia, pp. 131, 132.
Pope's old enemy Dennis, was caricatured in it as Sir Tremendous; but it had also the effect of adding another and abler foe to the list of his opponents, the player and manager, Colley Cibber, whose open ridicule of a part of this ill-judged jeu d'esprit began the feud which ultimately secured for him the supreme honors of the "Dunciad."
W., who had retired to a corner to practise a little by himself, told me that one of his friends, Comte de Pourtales, not at all of his way of thinking in politics, an Imperialist, was much pleased with a little jeu d'esprit he had made at his expense. W. caught the top of his skate in a crevice in the ice, and came down rather heavily in a sitting posture.
While still at Dolcoath, it is very probable that he put together the little pamphlet which appeared in London at the close of 1785, with the title "Baron Munchausen's Narrative of his Marvellous Travels and Campaigns in Russia," and having given his jeu d'esprit to the world, and possibly earned a few guineas by it, it is not likely that he gave much further thought to the matter.
But in this case I should only exchange one disquietude for another, and with loss: figure to yourself, my dear Sir, that in giving you a chaise which would fall to pieces before you had got half-way to Paris, figure to yourself how much I should suffer, in giving an ill impression of myself to a man of honour, and lying at the mercy, as I must do, d'un homme d'esprit.
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