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The Empress Queen took a very different course. Though the haughtiest of princesses, though the most austere of matrons, she forgot in her thirst for revenge both the dignity of her race and the purity of her character, and condescended to flatter the lowborn and low-minded concubine, who, having acquired influence by prostituting herself, retained it by prostituting others.
A handful of armed men are in your walls: will ye who chased from your gates the haughtiest knights the most practised battle-men of Rome, succumb now to one hundred and fifty hirelings and strangers? Will ye arm for your Tribune? You are silent! be it so. Will you arm for your own liberties your own Rome? Silent still!
A tremendous uproar surely, that could drown the voices of those gentlemen! And so he moved again, to the great Hotel de Soissons, a vast palace, with a garden of some acres. Fantastic circumstances variegated the wild rush of speculation. The haughtiest of the nobility rented mean rooms near Law's abode, to be able to get at him.
Indeed, I found little to say, except that the village would be the worse by so much as the Duchess of York was the better for Mistress Barbara's departure; the civility won me nothing but the haughtiest curtsey and a taunt. "Must you rehearse your pretty speeches on me before you venture them on your friends, sir?" she asked. "I am at your mercy, Mistress Barbara," I pleaded.
That a woman should dare to treat him so! a woman whom he had deigned to love the loveliest and noblest of women; but at the same time the haughtiest, most vengeful, and most hateful. He had once read this maxim: "When a man has committed a base action, if only one other knows of it he carries the death-warrant of his peace in the bosom of his garment."
At this period, the reigning favorite at court was Madame de Montespan the most infamous and unprincipled, but most witty and brilliant of all the king's mistresses, and the haughtiest woman of her age. Her tastes were expensive, and her habits extravagant and luxurious. On her the sovereign showered diamonds and rubies. He could refuse her nothing. She received so much from him, that she could afford to endow a convent the mere building of which cost one million eight hundred thousand livres. Her children were legitimatized, and declared princes of the blood. Through her the royal favors flowed. Ambassadors, ministers, and even prelates, paid their court to her. On her the reproofs of Bossuet fell without effect. Secure in her ascendency over the mind of Louis, she triumphed over his court, and insulted the nation. But, at last, he grew weary of her, although she remained at court eighteen years, and she was dismissed from Versailles, on a pension of a sum equal to six hundred thousand dollars a year. She lived twenty-two years after her exile from court, and in great splendor, sometimes hoping to regain the ascendency she had once enjoyed, and at others in those rigorous penances which her church inflicts as the expiation for sin. To the last, however, she was haughty and imperious, and kept up the vain etiquette of a court. Her husband, whom she had abandoned, and to whom, after her disgrace, she sought to be reconciled, never would hear her name mentioned; and the king, whom, for nearly twenty years, she had enthralled, heard of her death with indifference, as he was starting for a hunting excursion. "Ah, indeed," said Louis
He must choose between his country and his state; between his flag and the love and respect of his relatives and friends. In the end, the flag won. It was the flag he had taken his boyish oath to honor; on more than one occasion, he had seen the haughtiest colors on the ocean bow with respect before it; he had seen men, writhing in the agony of death, expend their last breath to defend it.
Fortune, I dare not say Providence, which was preparing for the haughtiest of kings, humiliation the most profound, the most-public, the most durable, the most unheard-of, strengthened more and more his taste for this woman, so adroit and expert at her trade; while the continued ill-humour and jealousy of Madame de Montespan rendered the new union still more solid.
Eleanor shrugged her shoulders impatiently. The whole affair was perfectly absurd. She had told Alice Waite so at luncheon, in her haughtiest manner. She picked up a book from the table and began to read, but in spite of her determination to ignore it, her thoughts would wander to the pretty picture outside her window.
She saw him kissing the soles of Davy's feet. There is something despotic in her nature which was satisfied in his act. There is also a devotion in her nature which might be as profound. She would kiss the soles of David Lockwin's feet, were he dead. She could kiss his feet were he despised and rejected among men. Yet she is counted the haughtiest woman that goes by. "Mrs.
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