"As the women quarrel at Choisy for _notre maître_! They will be friends again when both have lost the game, like Louise de Mailly and the Duchesse de Châteauroux. The poor Duchess! Fitz-James and Maurepas, Châtillon and Bouillon, Rochefoucauld and le Père Pérussot, all together, were too strong for her. All the gossip of that Metz affair reached you across the water, I suppose? Those pests of Jesuits! if they want him to be their Very Christian King, and to cure him of his worship of Cupidon, they will have to pull down all the stones of La Muette and the Parc aux Cerfs! What good is it to kill _one_ poor woman when women are as plentiful as roses at Versailles? And now let me drive you to Madame de Vaudreuil; if _she_ do not convert you from your fancy for Lorraine this morning, Thargélie Dumarsais will to-night." "_Mon zer zevalier, Paris at ado'able! Vous n'êtes pas sé'ieux en voulant le quitter, z'en suis sûre!_" cried the Comtesse de Vaudreuil, in the pretty lisp of the day, a charming little blonde, patched and powdered, nestled in a chair before a fire of perfumed wood, teasing her monkey Zulmé with a fan of Pater's, and giving a pretty little sign of contempt and disbelief with some sprays of jessamine employed in the chastisement of offenders more responsible and quite as audacious as Zulmé. Her companion, her "zer zevalier," was a young man of seven-and-twenty, with a countenance frank, engaging, nobly cast, far more serious, far more thoughtful in its expression, than was often seen in that laughing and mocking age. Exiled when a mere boy for a satirical pamphlet which had provoked the wrath of the Censeur Royal, and might have cost him the Bastille but for intercession from Lunéville, he had passed his youth less in pleasure than in those philosophical and political problems then beginning to agitate a few minds; which were developed later on in the "Encyclopédie," later still in the Assemblée Nationale. Voltaire and Helvétius had spoken well of him at Madame de Geoffrin's; Claudine de Tencin had introduced him the night before in her brilliant salons; the veteran Fontenelle had said to him, "_Monsieur, comme censeur royal je refusai mon approbation à votre brochure; comme homme libre je vous en félicite_"--all that circle was prepared to receive him well, the young Chevalier de Tallemont might make a felicitous season in Paris if he chose, with the romance of his exile about him, and Madame de Vaudreuil smiling kindly on him. "The country!" she cried; "the country is all very charming in eclogues and pastorals, but out of them it is a desert of ennui! What _can_ you mean, Léon, by leaving Paris to-morrow? Ah, méchant, there must be something we do not see, some love besides that of the Lorraine woods!" "Madame, is there not my father?"