higher title took from me all feeling of this; and I looked upon being a marchioness as a trifle, not that I saw the bauble in its true light, but because it fell short of what I had figured to myself I should soon obtain. The king’s desires grew very impatient, and it was not long before I was privately married to him. I was no sooner his wife than I found all the queen come upon me; I felt myself conscious of royalty, and even the faces of my most intimate acquaintance seemed to me to be quite strange. I hardly knew them: height had turned my head, and I was like a man placed on a monument, to whose sight all creatures at a great distance below him appear like so many little pigmies crawling about on the earth; and the prospect so greatly delighted me, that I did not presently consider that in both cases descending a few steps erected by human hands would place us in the number of those very pigmies who appeared so despicable. Our marriage was kept private for some time, for it was not thought proper to make it public (the affair of the divorce not being finished) till the birth of my daughter Elizabeth made it necessary. But all who saw me knew it; for my manner of speaking and acting was so much changed with my station, that all around me plainly perceived I was sure I was a queen. While it was a secret I had yet something to wish for; I could not be perfectly satisfied till all the world was acquainted with my fortune: but when my coronation was over, and I was raised to the height of my ambition, instead of finding myself happy, I was in reality more miserable than ever; for, besides that the aversion I had naturally to the king was much more difficult to dissemble after marriage than before, and grew into a perfect detestation, my imagination, which had thus warmly pursued a crown, grew cool when I was in the possession of it, and gave me time to reflect what mighty matter I had gained by all this bustle; and I often used to think myself in the case of the fox-hunter, who, when he has toiled and sweated all day in the chase as if some unheard-of blessing was to crown his success, finds at last all he has got by his labor is a stinking nauseous animal. But my condition was yet worse than his; for he leaves the loathsome wretch to be torn by his hounds, whilst I was obliged to fondle mine, and meanly pretend him to be the object of my love. For the whole time I was in this envied, this exalted state, I led a continual life of hypocrisy, which I now know nothing on earth can compensate. I had no companion but the man I hated. I dared not disclose my sentiments to any person about me, nor did any one presume to enter into any freedom of conversation with me; but all who spoke to me talked to the queen, and not to me; for they would have said just the same things to a dressed-up puppet, if the king had taken a fancy to call it his wife. And as I knew every woman in the court was my enemy, from thinking she