"A fool's paradise!" said the Duc, sagaciously tapping his gold bonbonnière. But many a paradise like it has dawned and faded, before and since the Versailles of Louis Quatorze. He loved, and Madame la Marquise loved him. Through one brief tumult of struggle he passed: struggle between the creed of the Dominican abbey, where no sin would have been held so thrice accursed, so unpardonable, so deserving of the scourge and the stake as this--and the creed of the Bourbon Court, where churchmen's gallantries were every-day gossip; where the Abbé de Rancé, ere he founded the saintly gloom of La Trappe, scandalized town and court as much as Lauzun; where the Père de la Chaise smiled complacently on La Fontanges' ascendancy; where three nobles rushed to pick up the handkerchief of that royal confessor, who washed out with holy water the royal indiscretions, as you wash off grains of dust with perfumed water; where the great and saintly Bishop of Condom could be checked in a rebuking harangue, and have the tables turned on him by a mischievous reference to Mademoiselle de Mauléon; where life was intrigue for churchmen and laymen alike, and where the abbé's rochet and the cardinal's scarlet covered the same vices as were openly blazoned on the gold aiglettes of the Garde du Corps and the costly lace of the Chambellan du Roi. A storm, brief and violent as the summer storms that raged over Versailles, was roused between the conflicting thoughts at war within him, between the principles deeply rooted from long habit and stern belief, and the passions sprung up unbidden with the sudden growth and gorgeous glow of a tropical flower--a storm, brief and violent, a struggle, ended that night, when he stood on the balcony with the woman he loved, felt her lips upon his, and bowed down to her feet delirious and strengthless. "I have won my wager with Adeline; I have vanquished _mon beau_ De Launay," thought Madame la Marquise, smiling, two days after, as she sat, en negligé, in her broidered chair, pulling Osmin's ears, and stirring the frothy chocolate handed to her by her negro, Azor, brought over in the suite of the African embassy from Ardra, full of monkeyish espièglerie, and covered with gems--a priceless dwarf, black as ink, and but two feet high, who could match any day with the Queen's little Moor. "He amuses me with his vows of eternal love. Eternal love?--how _de trop_ we should find it, here in Versailles! But it is amusing enough to play at for a season. No, that is not half enough--he adores! This poor Gaston!"