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Melancholy as I am, my son has made me laugh by telling me what has been found in Madame du Maine's letters, seized at the Cardinal de Polignac's. In one of her letters, this very discreet and virtuous personage writes, "We are going into the country tomorrow; and I shall so arrange the apartments that your chamber shall be next to mine.
He was quite right, for just as I knocked at Mrs Maine's door, a regular squandering, scattering fire began, and you could hear the bullets striking the wall with a sharp pat, bringing down showers of white lime-dust and powdered stone. I found Mrs Maine seated on the floor with her children, pale and trembling, the little things the while laughing and playing over some pictures.
The good man has only had to deal with the Prince de Listhnay." "Prince de Listhnay! Who is he?" "Rue du Bac, 110." "I do not know him." "Yes, you do, monseigneur." "Where have I seen him?" "In your antechamber." "What! this pretended Prince de Listhnay?" "Is no other than that scoundrel D'Avranches, Madame de Maine's valet-de-chambre." "Ah! I was astonished that she was not in it."
Such works as Maine's Ancient Law, Tylor's Primitive Culture, Lubbock's Origin of Civilisation, show how fruitful this method is, and what floods of light it pours on the history of society. Now what is true of civilisation generally will be true also of religion, which is one of its principal elements.
She had the honour of being presented to the Queen, who paid her a thousand compliments respecting the Duc du Maine's perfections, being so candid and so good natured as to say: "You would have been just the person to educate Monseigneur."
Scarcely had Anne of Austria conducted the young queen to her apartments and taken from her brow the head-dress of ceremony, when she went to see her son in his cabinet, where, alone, melancholy, and depressed, he was indulging, as if to exercise his will, in one of those terrible inward passions king's passions which create events when they break out, and with Louis XIV., thanks to his astonishing command over himself, became such benign tempests, that his most violent, his only passion, that which Saint Simon mentions with astonishment, was that famous fit of anger which he exhibited fifty years later, on the occasion of a little concealment of the Duc de Maine's, and which had for result a shower of blows inflicted with a cane upon the back of a poor valet who had stolen a biscuit.
Errum!" and Private Peter Pegg's lower jaw dropped, and his eyes, as he fixed them upon the subaltern's face, opened in so ghastly a stare of dread that, in spite of his annoyance, Ensign Maine's hands were clapped to his mouth to check a guffaw.
Not that all were for war, by any means. Many were clinging to a forlorn hope, but they could talk of nothing else. Betty had just listened to the twenty-eighth theory of the cause of the Maine's destruction when she turned in response to a familiar drawl. "Why, howdy, Miss Madison, I'm real glad to run across you at last."
After all, it must be admitted, however, that the measures they took and the men they secured, were strangely unequal to the circumstances of the case, when the details became known; in fact, there was a general murmur of surprise among the public, at the contemptible nature of the whole affair. But let me relate the circumstances accompanying the discovery of M. du Maine's pitiable treachery.
He shrank, more advisedly, perhaps, from another tendency which has given popularity to a different school. Though he gradually became an admirer of Maine's generalisations, founded upon cautious inquiries and recommended by extraordinary literary skill, his own intellectual aptitudes did not prompt him to become a rival. Briefly, his attitude of mind was in the strictest sense judicial.
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