fashionable, and which, later on, Madame Dubarry and Queen Marie Antoinette were to push to such a high degree of perfection. Already rustic fantasies were putting in an appearance where bored caprice found a refuge. Already bloated tritons, grave goddesses and learned nymphs, busts with long perukes, frozen with horror in their green niches, saw arise from the earth an English garden amidst the startled yews. Little lawns, little brooks, little bridges were soon to dethrone Olympus, to replace it by a dairy, a strange parody of nature which the English copy without understanding, a real child’s game become the pastime of an indolent master, who did not know how to escape from boredom at Versailles in Versailles itself.

But the chevalier was too charmed, too ravished at finding himself there, to permit a single critical reflection to rise to his mind. He was, on the contrary, ready to admire everything, turning the letter in his fingers like a provincial does with his hat, when a pretty chambermaid opened the door and said softly to him:

‘Come this way, sir!’

He followed her; after passing again through several more or less mysterious corridors, she introduced him into a big room where the shutters were half closed. There she stopped and seemed to listen.

‘Hide-and-seek again,’ said the chevalier to himself.

However, at the end of several minutes, a door opened again, and another chambermaid, who it seemed must be as pretty as the first, repeated in the same tone the same words:

‘Come this way, sir.’

If he had been moved at Versailles, he was moved now in a different fashion, for he understood that he was approaching the threshold of the temple which the goddess inhabited. He advanced with a beating heart: a soft light, delicately veiled by thin gauze curtains, succeeded to shade: a delicious, almost imperceptible perfume was diffused in the air around him: the chambermaid timidly drew aside the corner of a silk curtain, and at the end of a large sitting-room, furnished with the most elegant simplicity, he saw the lady of the fan, that is to say, the all-powerful marquise.

She was alone, seated before a table, wrapped in a dressing-gown, her head leaning on her hand, and she seemed very preoccupied. When she saw the chevalier enter, she rose with a sudden and, as it were, involuntary movement.

‘You come from the king?’

The chevalior could have answered, but he could find nothing better to do than to bow profoundly, as he presented to the marquise the letter that he brought her. She took it, or rather she took possession of it, with extreme vivacity. While she was opening it her hands trembled on the envelope.

This letter, written in the king’s own hand, was fairly long. She devoured it, so to speak, in the twinkling of an eye, then she read it greedily with profound attention, her brows knit and her lips compressed. She was not beautiful like this, and had no longer any resemblance to the magic apparition in the king’s lobby. When she reached the end, she seemed to reflect. Little by little her face, which had paled, flushed to a delicate carnation (at this hour she wore no rouge); not only did her grace return, but a flash of true beauty passed over her delicate features: her cheeks could have been taken for two rose petals. She uttered a half sigh, let the letter fall on the table, and turning towards the chevalier:

‘I have made you wait, sir,’ she said to him with the most charming smile, ‘but the fact is I was not yet dressed, and I am not still! That is why I was forced to bring you here by stealth: for I am besieged here almost as much as I was at home. I would like to send the king an answer. Will it weary you to do my message?’