“Will you be quiet,” she said, severely, “and answer my question? Are you familiar with the name?” “I should never venture to be familiar with a name I didn’t know,” he asserted. “Ah, you don’t know it? You have never heard of Stanislas Leczinski, who was king of Poland? Of Marie Leczinska, who married Louis XV.?” “Oh, to be sure. I remember. The lady whose portrait one sees at Versailles.” “Quite so. Very well,” she continued, “the last representative of the Leczinskis, in the elder line, was the Princess Anna Leczinska, who, in 1858, married the Duke of Zeln. She was the daughter of John Leczinski, Duke of Grodnia and Governor of Galicia, and of the Archduchess Henrietta d’.ste, a cousin of the Emperor of Austria. She was also a great heiress, and an extremely handsome woman. But the Duke of Zeln was a bad lot, a viveur, a gambler, a spendthrift. His wife, like a fool, made her entire fortune over to him, and he proceeded to play ducks and drakes with it. By the time their son was born he’d got rid of the last farthing. Their son wasn’t born till ’63, five years after their marriage. Well, and then, what do you suppose the Duke did?” “Reformed, of course. The wicked husband always reforms when a child is born, and there’s no more money,” he generalised. “You know perfectly well what he did,” said she. “He petitioned the German Diet to annul the marriage. You see, having exhausted the dowry of the Princess Anna, it occurred to him that if she could only be got out of the way, he might marry another heiress, and have the spending of another fortune.” “Clever dodge,” he observed. “Did it come off?” “It came off, all too well. He based his petition on the ground that the marriage had never been.... I forget what the technical term is. Anyhow, he pretended that the princess had never been his wife except in name, and that the child couldn’t possibly be his. The Emperor of Austria stood by his connection, like the loyal gentleman he is; used every scrap of influence he possessed to help her. But the duke, who was a Protestant (the princess was of course a Catholic), the duke persuaded all the Protestant States in the Diet to vote in his favour. The Emperor of Austria was powerless, the Pope was powerless. And the Diet annulled the marriage.” “Ah,” said the mandarin. “Yes,” she went on. “The marriage was annulled, and the child declared illegitimate. Ernest Augustus, as the duke was somewhat inconsequently named, married again, and had other children, the eldest of whom is the present bearer of the title—the same Duke of Zeln one hears of, quarrelling with the croupiers at Monte Carlo. The Princess Anna, with her baby, came to Austria. The Emperor gave her a pension, and lent her one of his country houses to live in—Schloss Sanct-Andreas. Our hostess, by-the-bye, the Countess Wohenhoffen, was her intimate friend and her première dame d’honneur.” “Ah,” said the mandarin.