‘Wouldn’t you say’, said the king, ‘that this lad was going hunting, and that somebody was killing his falcon on his wrist? Who’s he annoyed at, anyway?’

‘It is quite true,’ continued the marquise, going on with her reading in a lower tone, ‘it is quite true that we are near neighbours and distant relations of the Abbé Chauvelin—’

‘That’s what it is,’ said Louis XV yawning. ‘Still another nephew of the Inquests and Requests. My Parlement abuse my goodness: they have really too big families.’

‘But if he is only a distant relation!—’

‘Even so! that crowd isn’t worth anything. That Abbé Chauvelin is a Jansenist. He’s a good chap, but he’s one of the resigned list. Throw that letter in the fire, and don’t let me hear about it again.’

II

These last words pronounced by the king were not exactly a condemnation to death, but they were almost a prohibition of going on living. What, in seventeen hundred and fifty-six, could a young man without fortune do, whose name the king didn’t like mentioned? Try to be a clerk, or turn philosopher, poet perhaps, but without the dedications, and the trade in that case wasn’t worth anything.

Such was not, by a great deal, the vocation of the Chevalier Vauvert, who had just written with tears the letter the king laughed at. At this moment, alone with his father, deep in the old château of Neauflette, he was walking up and down the room with a sad and furious look.

‘I want to go to Versailles,’ he was saying.

‘And what will you do there?’

‘I don’t know: but what am I doing here?’

‘You are keeping me company; it is quite true that that cannot be very amusing for you, and I don’t hold you back in any way. But are you forgetting that your mother is dead?’

‘No, sir; and I have promised her to consecrate to you the life which you gave me. I will come back, but I must go. I can’t stay any longer in this place.’

‘What is the cause of that?’

‘A mighty love. I am madly in love with Mademoiselle d’Annebault.’

‘You know that it is hopeless. It is only Molière who makes marriages without a dowry. Are you forgetting my disgrace too?’

‘Ah, sir, your disgrace—might I be allowed, without swerving from the most profound respect, to ask you what caused that? We are not Parlement men. We pay the tax, we do not make it. If the Parlement haggles about the king’s revenue, it is their affair and not ours. Why does the Abbé Chauvelin drag us down in his ruin?’

‘The Abbé Chauvelin acts like an honest man. He refuses to approve of this tithe because he is disgusted with the waste at the court. Nothing like this would have happened in the time of Madame Châteauroux. She was beautiful, at least, that lady, and she cost nothing, not even what she gave so generously. She was mistress and sovereign, and she declared herself satisfied if the king did not send her to languish in a dungeon when he withdrew his favour from her. But this Étioles woman, this Le Normand, this insatiable Poisson!’