me making advances towards you, and giving myself the honour of writing to you, before you have discovered this confidence of mine?" A more subtle turn of expression for saving her dignity could hardly be invented. The Princess, having thus broken the ice, continues her letter by asking the Duke to speak of her to Philip V. as a lady fitted to perform the merely honorary charge of conducting his young bride to Madrid. Next she brought into play her old intimacy with Portocarrero; and Portocarrero, in pursuance of former promises, and at the Princess's suggestion, sent her a letter representing that, in his opinion and that of the chief statesmen of Spain, the Princesse des Ursins was admirably qualified for the distinction she desired. This letter of Portocarrero was duly forwarded to the Maréchale de Noailles, who laid it before the French minister, Torcy; but Torcy replied that the selection must depend on the choice of Victor Amadeus, Duke of Savoy, the father of the future Spanish bride. The Princesse des Ursins, however, was not to be put off with such a reply. She knew that Torcy was favourably inclined towards her, and she now, through her friend the Maréchale, made another fine diplomatic suggestion, to the effect that Torcy should pay a visit to the Piedmontese ambassador at Paris, and should, just in the way of casual conversation, carelessly inquire whom the Duke of Savoy thought of naming as travelling chaperone to the Piedmontese princess, and then just as carelessly throw out a hint that the Princesse des Ursins would perform such a service admirably well. The Princess, knowing the ways well of kings and ambassadors, was sure the ambassador would report this conversation to the Duke of Savoy. The event justified her prevision, for on writing a letter with her own hand to the Duke of Savoy, he replied that he himself was not opposed to her request, only he referred the matter to Louis XIV. This was precisely the point to which the Princess desired to come that Louis XIV. and the Court of Versailles should have the absolute decision of the affair. All her diplomatic stratagems now, therefore, were made to converge on Madame de Maintenon and Louis XIV. himself. She approached Madame de Maintenon in the subtlest and most refined insinuations of flattery; and as for Louis XIV., she, with a consummate air of much self-denial and modesty, requested that it should be represented to him that she would only, if it seemed best, go as far as the frontier in an official position, and afterwards proceed to Madrid to pay her court to the young King and Queen in a private capacity; and indeed, moreover, she really had business at the Spanish capital. Were the meshes of diplomacy ever spun of a finer and subtler texture than these? Nevertheless, Louis XIV., with his appreciation of character and his knowledge of the ways of ambition, saw perhaps before anybody through those fine-drawn manoeuvres, and was not displeased by them. He saw clearly that what Madame des Ursins really was aiming at was the post of camerera mayor. Nevertheless the salutary advice he had given to his grandson on his departure for Spain was to take care that all his chief officers were Spaniards, and not to favour the French and arouse feelings of national jealousy; he consequently had his doubts about the advisability of naming a French lady for so thoroughly Spanish a dignity as that of the camerera mayor. But he also had advised Philip V. to place every confidence in Portocarrero, and Portocarrero was not only wholly gained over by the Princesse des Ursins, but Portocarrero produced some very solid reasons why, in the present instance, a Spanish lady ought not to fill the post, and why the choice of a foreign noblewoman, who had no family to lead into honours, dignities, and pensions, and was thus not calculated to excite the jealousy and animosity of families rivalling with her own, would in every respect be preferable. Madame de Maintenon's mediation was the last and great trump-card which the Princess laid down upon the hesitation and scruples of Louis XIV. The game was won, and she was actually named camerera mayor before she had quitted Rome, and before the young Piedmontese princess had left Turin. The Princesse des Ursins began forthwith to organize her household so that she might enter Spain in due state. She strained all her resources to make a fitting display in the eyes of a people fond of pomp. "I have usually four gentlemen-inwaiting," she wrote to the Maréchal de Noailles; "now I take another, a Spaniard; and when at Madrid I shall take two or three more, who shall be well acquainted with the Court and be calculated to do me credit. Of the four which I now. entertain, two are French and two are Italian. One of the latter is of one of the best Sicilian families, the other is a near relative of Prince Vaini. ' She increased her pages to the number of six-"tous gens de condition et capables d'etre chevaliers de Malte." She had her chaplain. "I do not speak of my other attendants; I have these of every kind. I 66 66 have twelve lackeys - my ordinary supply. | French and half of Spanish fashion; the When arrived at the Court, I will increase dishes half of one kind and half of the other. the number with Spaniards." She had one But the Spanish ladies - the attendants of very fine carriage, sans or ni argent néan- their new young Queen-had visited the moins;" but she had another, a gilded supper-table before the royal couple sat state-carriage, lately ordered; this was to down, and saw with disgust this array of go with six horses when she drove outside heretical French meats on the table. Ever Madrid. However, she assures her corres- since the beginning of time, so to speak, pondent, the mother of twenty-two children, the Spaniards had insisted that the brides with an eye on the royal coffer, that she will of their sovereigns should, immediately on not have recourse to the treasury of Louis entering Spain, become pure Spanish at XIV. "Je suis gueuse, il est vrai; mais once, conform to the severe usages of Spanje suis encore plus fière." On this occa-ish etiquette, and take to the Spartan diet, sion I will make it a point of honour not to demand anything. Nevertheless my expenses shall be suited to the splendour of my position, and shall make the Spaniards admire the greatness of the King." However, it appears that, on the eve of embarking on her great enterprise, she began to think seriously of the difficulties into which she was about to plunge. "I believe," she wrote to Torcy, that I shall meet with as many adventures as Don Quixote in the undertaking you impose upon me." the national puchero, and the garlic of Spain. The Spanish ladies at once seized these abominable French inventions, and threw them into corners of the room and out of windows into the street. This energetic proceeding naturally caused immense surprise to the only three foreign persons of the party at Figuieres to the young King and his bride, and to the Princesse des Ursins. Nevertheless, all had sufficient selfcommand to go through the supper without remark. However, as soon as the young She met the young Princess Marie Louise Queen was alone with her husband and the de Savoie at Villa-franca, near Nice, to Princesse des Ursins, her indignation broke which place she had gone by sea. She was loose. She sobbed, she wept, and she delighted with the appearance of the young stormed. She complained bitterly of the queen, and wrote to Torcy," qu'elle saurait dismissal of her Piedmontese attendants. faire la reine à merveille; " and indeed, She was indignant at the coarseness of the Marie Louise, without being a perfect Spanish ladies, and declared that she would beauty, was a worthy sister of the Duchess go no farther, but return to Piedmont. It de Bourgogne, the darling of Louis XIV. was impossible to appease the wrath of the and the Court of Versailles. She was tall young bride. Philip finally left the room, and well made, with a brilliant though pale hoping that, in his absence, the indignation complexion, with a loving heart and a noble of the Queen would subside; but there was nature, thoroughly capable of appreciating no sign of this. Marie Louise passed the the fine qualities of Madame des Ursins, to night obstinately alone, declaring, in spite whom she speedily attached herself with of all the remonstrances of Madame des Urchildish affection. From Villafranca and sins, that she would return instantly back Nice the camerera mayor travelled through to Turin. Here was a scandalous beginning the south of France, side by side with her of royal wedded life! The poor child did young charge, in a litter, to Figuières, on not recover even on the following day from the Spanish frontier. There is no need to her ill-humour and vexation; so on the folsay that they were received with royal hon-lowing night, Philip himself, acting on the ours and discharge of artillery at every town on their route, and that, according to invariable Spanish custom on arriving at the frontier, the Piedmontese attendants were dismissed, and their place supplied by the stiff and formal ladies of Spain. advice of his chief gentleman-in-waiting, assumed the air of the injured party, and sent word to his Queen that he would retire to rest alone. This brought Marie Louise to reason. She apologised for her childish conduct, promised to behave in future like a queen and a woman; and on the third morning after the marriage the young couple left Figuières completely reconciled. Madame des Ursins, in the commencement, wisely confined her cares to the duties of her office, which were for the most part of a singularly domestic character for a descendant of the great family of the Tremouilles. She writes to the Maréchal de Noailles, "Dans quel emploi, bon Dieu! m'avez vous mise ? Je n'ai pas le moindre | prie-dieu, who would infallibly, if he had repos." been knocked over, have fallen upon the Queen. In fact, the Princess writes she could neither take her ease after dinner, nor eat when she was hungry. She was only too happy to snatch a bad meal as she ran on her duties. It was, she said, very rare for her not to be called the moment she sat down to table. "In truth, Madame de Maintenon would laugh if she knew the details of my charge. Tell her, I beg, that it is I who have the honour of taking the King of Spain's dressing-gown when he goes to bed, and of giving him that and his slippers when he rises. That, however, I could make light of; but really it seems too absurd that every evening, when the King comes to the Queen's bedchamber, the Conde de Benavente should hand me the King's sword, and a bottle and a lamp, which I ordinarily upset on my dress." Indeed, among the other strange fashions of royal etiquette in Spain, there was one which provided that the King, when he went to visit the Queen at night, should go in a cloak armed with sword and buckler, and carrying a bottle. The camerera mayor had, moreover, to wake the King in the morning, and sometimes "he is so kind," wrote the Princess, "that he often sends for me two hours at least before I want to rise." All know of the rigours of old palace Spanish etiquette, which allowed kings to be roasted if the proper officer was not at hand to remove the brazier, and queens to be dragged by the stirrup to death by rearing horses, rather than permit them to be touched by a profane hand. Some of the incidents given by the Princess of the jealousy and rivalry of the great grandees on matters of etiquette are truly comic. Thus we have the venerable Patriarch of the Indies, who, however, the Princess says, looked like an ape, taking a napkin surreptitiously into church with him, and rushing at the most solemn moment of the sacrament before the King and Queen, and producing his cloth from his pocket for their use, because he found that it had been arranged that the camerera mayor should take his place at the ceremony. Another scene described in her letter is, if possible, still more amusing: thus we have the Conde de Priego and the Duque de Osuna fighting at the foot of the altar for the honour of moving his majesty's chair up to his priedieu. Both noblemen were very small, but the Duque de Osuna carried the day; and yet there was a moment, writes the Princess, when she thought the Duke, who was no bigger than a rat, would tumble beneath the chair, and fall upon the King at his The influence of the strong mind of the Princesse des Ursins upon the youthful King and Queen of Spain became soon to be felt even in matters of government. The state of ruin, hunger, and desolation of Spain at the time of the accession of the first Bourbon prince was something appalling. There are no records in history which present such a picture of beggared pride and misery and decay. The giant form which had once overawed the world had become a ragged scarecrow-an object of mockery and scorn. Charles II., the last king of the house of Austria, was a beggar and a pauper among monarchs. He was unable at times to find food for the table of the gentlemen of his bedchamber, and even oats and straw for his horses. He went on begging expeditions from town to town to ask for money, and generally in vain. The once-dreaded legions of Spain were reduced down to a miserable, starved, ragged remnant of unpaid boys and old men, numbering about fifteen thousand, officered by hidalgos, who begged in the streets of Flanders and in the ports of Spain. The dockyards which sent forth the invincible Armada had not a ship on the stocks. The art of shipbuilding was forgotten, and a few wretched men-of-war lay rotting in the harbours. Whole provinces had become denuded of towns and villages; the most fertile districts of Spain had become a desert; commerce and industry and agriculture were despised alike by all classes, and were in fact non-existent. Nearly all the needs of Spain - its clothes and its very bread were produced by foreign workmen. Each Spaniard desired, without income, to live like a nobleman. The population decreased yearly. People ceased to marry, or entered into monasteries and convents; and priests and monks owned, it was supposed, about a third part of the soil of Spain. It was not then a misfortune for Spain to exchange the effete Austrian dynasty for the race of the Bourbons, under whose rule France had risen almost in the same proportion as Spain had fallen, which had adopted more humane principles of toleration and more enlightened ideas of political economy. Yet the difficulty of reconciling the Spaniards to any reforms or system of government imported from the institutions of their ancient enemies, to be carried out by the French counsellors of Philip V., was necessarily very great. The hatred of the gavachos, as the French have been called in Spain from time immemorial, was | whose loveliness of nature, whose intellecintense. Hence it was that the influence of the Princesse des Ursins was so salutary. She was only ostensibly occupying the post of camerera mayor without any acknowledged mission from the Court of Versailles, and yet she was thoroughly acquainted with its policy and in constant correspondence with Torcy, the French Minister, and with Madame de Maintenon and the Maréchal de Noailles. On excellent terms at first with Portocarrero, who at the beginning of the reign of Philip V. was all powerful, she had by far better opportunities of bringing about harmonious relations between the governments of France and Spain than the French ambassador himself, while her previous residence in Spain had made her well-acquainted with the usages and necessities of the country. tual qualities, whose education, whose liberality in the matter of etiquette, and whose bright and good looks even at sixty-six made her an entertaining companion as well as a good adviser. The former Spanish queens had been condemned for amusement to insupportably childish games, something like spills, with their husbands, and to badly-acted Spanish plays. The Princesse des Ursins endeavoured to lighten the heavy atmosphere of the Spanish Court by getting up theatrical amusements, in which Corneille and Molière replaced Calderon and Lopez de la Vega; and by concerts in which the music of the Italian masters, just then beginning to become fashionable in Europe, was first heard in the capital of Spain, in the palace of Buen Retiro. The young King and Queen were grateful for the vivacity and variety which she thus ingeniously and incessantly introduced into a life which both regarded as a kind of exile; and, moreover, the very domestic nature of her charge gave her an opportunity of tutoring the young Queen in such fashion that Philip V., who was perhaps the most uxorious monarch who ever reigned, was completely at the disposal of his wife. The task, however, was no easy one of getting the Spaniards, on the one side, to accept the government of a French King, assisted by French ministers, and of co-operating with the policy of Versailles on the other, so as to satisfy the exacting supervision which Louis XIV. and his ministers exercised over Spanish affairs; for although Louis XIV. had given his grandson the ad- The duties of her position naturally gave vice not to surround himself with French the Princess a right of advising on the manministers, and to respect all Spanish na- ners, dress, and habits of the King and tional feeling, yet this was but with the Queen; she extended this to matters of high view of rendering the Spaniard more easily policy, and invariably gave advice calcumanageable for the purposes of his own am-lated to conciliate the Spanish nation towards bition, and the maintenance of complete harmony between the two governments was indispensable in the war of the Spanish Succession. the new dynasty. She advised the use of the Spanish language exclusively at Court, the performance by the Queen of the customary pilgrimages to the shrine of our It was no wonder, moreover, that a Queen Lady of Atocha, and other sacred places: of Spain should give herself wholly up to the adoption by Philip V. of the Spanish an adviser and companion like the Princesse costume, and especially of the stiff unsightly des Ursins, for the monotony and isolation golilla, or Spanish ruff, to which the nobilof palace life, guarded about by the inviol-ity were especially attached; the royal atable prescriptions of Spanish etiquette, was tendance at bull-fights, and the practice of something frightful. According to Spanish the national juego de canas; at the same notions, the life of a Spanish queen should partake of the seclusion of the harem and the convent. She saw no society but those of her regular attendants. A tyrannical camerera mayor might, if she chose, be intolerable. She might, as did the camerera mayor of the first queen of Charles II., prevent her from looking out of window. The stern gloom and rigidity with which camereras mayores had exercised their authority were habitual, and some of the former French queens of Spain had died of the terrible monotony of their prison life. It was, then, a great boon for the wife of Philip V. to be allowed the unprecedented luxury of a French-woman for a camerera mayor, time she strongly dissuaded the monarch from attending at those human sacrifices, the autos da fe, one of which was always prepared in honour of every new accession and every royal marriage. And the young Bourbon King was the first monarch who ventured thus to discountenance the practice of those rites of Moloch. Madame des Ursins, indeed, did not hesitate to grapple at once with the Inquisition immediately on her arrival in Spain, and her success in delivering Aguilar Diaz, the confessor of the late King, from its dungeons, after a struggle of four years, created a new power in the country. Her influence became so manifest at last, that the French ministers and Court attendants, including the Jesuit confessor who accompanied Philip V. to Madrid, all grew jealous of the great influence of the camerera mayor over the royal councils. The French ambassador in 1703, the Cardinal d'Estrées, especially had made himself remarkable by his hostility to Madame des Ursins, and a struggle for dominion took place between them. Louis XIV., who was the arbiter of their differences in the close watch which he kept upon the affairs of Spain, decided at first in favour of his ambassador, and determined on recalling the camerera mayor. He changed his determination on account of the urgent entreaties of the Queen, who supplicated, that if Madame des Ursins was recalled, the Cardinal and his nephew, the Abbé d'Estrées, who served him as secretary, should be recalled also. Other representations in favour of the Princess, which portrayed all Spain as ardently desiring the continuance of her stay in Spain, were made. A temporary reconciliation between the Cardinal and the Princess followed, as the price of the withdrawal of the recall of Madame des Ursins. However, at the last the Cardinal was removed, and the Abbé d'Estrées, who had deserted his uncle when he saw that he was likely to be worsted in the conflict, remained as ambassador; and the triumph of Madame des Ursins was completed by the recall of the Jesuit confessor, and nearly every French minister or attendant possessed of any authority in Spain. However, the Abbé d'Estrées, as ambassador, was unable to reconcile himself to the part he had undertaken, and while professing outwardly complete submission to the superiority of the camerera mayor, treacherously wrote a despatch to the French minister, full of bitterness and insinuation against his rival. He had offered himself to submit every despatch to the perusal of Madame des Ursins before sending it away, but this one despatch he endeavoured to send surreptitiously by the ordinary courier, who not seeing upon it the accustomed mark of the Princesse des Ursins, as a sign of her acquaintance with the contents, carried the despatch to the camerera mayor. With her usual audacity Madame des Ursins wrote indignant marginal notes, and one of them of a most singular character. She had an equerry, named d'Aubigny, called un tout petit sire by St. Simon, who played a sort of nondescript rôle among her attendants. He had immense share in her confidence, and it was complained that he was the only man who slept in the palace. Indeed, his apartment formed part of the suite of the Princess's own. In the des patch of the Abbé d'Estrées, mention was made of d'Aubigny, and it was stated that people had no doubt that he was married to her. Oh, pour mariée, non!" wrote the Princess in all the indignation of a grande dame, as a marginal note. 66 The opening of this despatch and the marginal note came to the knowledge of Louis XIV., and his anger was great. However, by the aid of her friends at Versailles, the Camerera got over this difficulty, and the Abbé d'Estrées in disgust followed his uncle, and gave up his post. But, nevertheless, shortly afterwards another subject of disagreement came between the Court of Versailles and that of Madrid, on the subject of the command of the war in Spain. The King insisted that Philip V. should shake off what he styled the shameful sloth of the palace, and put himself at the head of his armies. Madame des Ursins and the Queen both, however, set themselves against this advice of Louis XIV. The opposition of Madame des Ursins was not unknown at the Court of Versailles. The Cardinal d'Estrées, eager for revenge, beset all her friends with his representations, till, one by one, Torcy, Madame de Noailles (whose son-in-law, the Duc de Grammont, arrived at the Embassy of Madrid), and even Madame de Maintenon, ceased to defend her, and she was recalled. She was recalled, however, only to be sent back again with greater authority than before. Her disgrace was the way to her triumph. In fact, the affairs of Spain during her absence went from bad to worse. The King, after a brief effort at independence, had made his incapacity more apparent. Montellano, with the grandees in the Despacho, attempted to absorb the whole sovereign power, to oppose every French project, to prevent the formation of an army, and to prevent the King from being master of it. The great defeat of Blenheim came to throw into still greater disfavour the French alliance in Spain; and, to add to the difficulties of Louis XIV., the chief grandees began to be of opinion that the only hope of saving the integrity of the Spanish monarchy was to range Spain on the side of the allies, and against the monarch of France. The Queen of Spain, aware of the danger of their position, wrote day by day the most urgent letters of appeal to Madame de Maintenon for the return of her camerera mayor. Louis XIV. consented at last to send back the indispensable camerera mayor, but he did so with great repugnance. He who in early life had engaged with Colbert to deliver himself of any woman in twenty-four |