“What! Two kisses at life’s end What a passport to send me! Two is one too much, Adorable Nymph; I should die of pleasure at the first. “He showed me your portrait, and be not offended, Madame, when I tell you that I have taken the liberty of giving that the two kisses.” Perhaps Voltaire would not have written this letter, had he not read the one written by the King to the Duc de Choiseul, who refused to pay court to the left-hand queen: “My Cousin, “The discontent which your acts cause me forces me to exile you to Chanteloup, where you will take yourself within twenty-four hours. I would have sent you farther away were it not for the particular esteem in which I hold Madame de Choiseul. With this, I pray God, my cousin, to take you into His safe and holy protection. “Louis.” This exile was the only crime of the courtesan. On none of her enemies did she close the gates of the Bastille. And more than once did she place a pen in the hands of Louis XV with which to sign a pardon. Sometimes, indeed, she was ironic in her compassion. “Madame,” said M. de Sartines to her one day, “I have discovered a rogue who is scattering songs about you; what is to be done with him?” “Sentence him to sing them for a livelihood.” But she afterwards made the mistake of pensioning Chevalier de Morande to buy silence. The pleasures of the King and his favorite were troubled only by the fortune-tellers. Neither the King nor the countess believed in the predictions of the philosophers, but they did believe in divination. One day, returning from Choisy, Louis XV found under a cushion of his coach a slip of paper on which was transcribed this prediction of the monk Aimonius, the savant who could read all things from the vast book of the stars: