their flame-coloured garters, amid their immense flounces, risked this coquettish good night that our grandmothers called a curtsey, which our generation has replaced by the brutal handshake of the English.

But the king concerned himself with none of it, and only saw what he pleased. Alfieri perhaps was there, who narrates thus his presentation at Versailles in his Memoirs:

‘I knew that the king never spoke to strangers who were not notable. I could not, however, get accustomed to the impassive and supercilious bearing of Louis XV. He eyed the man who was presented to him from head to foot, and he had the air of receiving no impression of him. Yet it seems to me that if you said to a giant: “Here’s an ant that I am presenting to you!’, as he looked at it he would smile or perhaps say: “Ah, the little animal!” ’

The taciturn monarch passed then through these flowers, these beautiful ladies, and all that Court, preserving his solitude amidst the crowd. The chevalier had no need of long reflections to understand that he had nothing to hope for from the king, and that the story of his love would not win him any success in that quarter.

‘Unlucky fellow that I am,’ he thought. ‘My father was only too right when he said that at two steps from the king I would see an abyss between him and me. Even indeed if I risked asking for an audience, who will protect me? who will present me? There he is, this absolute master who can with one word change my destiny, make my fortune secure, fulfil all my wishes. He is there, before me; by stretching out my hand, I could touch his clothes. And I feel farther from him than if I were still in the depths of my province! How to speak to him? Who will come to my rescue?’

While the chevalier was lamenting himself thus, he saw a young lady enter, rather pretty, with an air full of grace and delicacy. She was dressed very simply, in a white robe, without diamonds or embroidery, with a rose over her ear. She had given her hand to a gentleman ‘all in amber’, as Voltaire said, and she was speaking quite low to him behind her fan. Now chance willed that in talking, laughing, and gesticulating, this fan happened to slip from her hand and to fall under a chair, precisely in front of the chevalier. He bent at once to pick it up, and to do that he knelt on one knee. The young lady seemed to him so charming, that he presented her fan to her without rising. She stopped, smiled, and passed on, thanking him with a slight inclination of the head: but, at the look she had thrown on the chevalier, he felt his heart beat without knowing why. He was right. This young lady was the little ‘d’Étoiles girl’, as the malcontents still called her, while the rest, in speaking of her, said, ‘the marquise’, as one says, ‘the queen’.

IV

‘That lady will protect me, that lady will come to my aid! Ah! how right the abbé was in telling me that a look would decide my life! Yes, those eyes that are so subtle and gentle, that little mocking delicious mouth, that little foot smothered under its pompom. That’s my good fairy!’

Such were the thoughts, almost uttered out aloud, of the chevalier going back to his inn. Whence came to him this sudden hope? Was it only his youth that was speaking, or had the eyes of the marquise spoken too?

But the difficulty remained always the same. If he no longer dreamed now of being presented to the king, who would present him to the marquise?

He spent a great part of the night in writing to Mademoiselle d’Annebault a letter almost the same as the one which Madame de Pompadour had read.

It would be very little use to repeat that letter. Apart from lunatics there are only lovers who perpetually feel the thrill of novelty as they perpetually repeat the same thing.