Sometimes the wit carried a more flattering note, and once when disgrace shadowed him at Court for having appeared in the Sun-King’s presence in a _pourpoint_ of a fashion not quite up to latest date, he said to His Majesty—“Sire, away from you, one is not merely unhappy: one also becomes ridiculous.” The conceit wiped away St Evrémond’s disfavour. He was a friend of several of the other renowned soldiers of his time, Turenne among them. It was one of Condé’s great delights to be read to by St Evrémond. The duke took pleasure in the lighter classics. Petronius had its attractions for him, as it had for the society generally of the time; but he would have none of Rabelais, finding the grossness of the Curé of Meudon intensely distasteful, and refusing to listen to the adventures of Gargantua and Pantagruel and Grandgousier, and all their tribe, he insisted on the book being thrown aside. The merry romances of Petronius, or, at least, attributed to that “_Elegantiæ Arbiter_” of a pagan court, while ill adapted as milk for babes, as perhaps even for the more advanced in years, were not soiled with the lowermost grossness of the Christian man’s pen, and they were not without appeal to the students of the classic literature opened up by the Renaissance, even as the milder licence of Boccaccio charmed. Truly, if the times were peculiar, it cannot be said of them that they were stagnant; and in movement and activity, the present century bears them some sort of comparison; though beyond this the parallel fails, to the winning of the days of Ninon. _Autres temps, autres mœurs_, and while there may be more veneer of morality in these present years of grace than then, the question remains whether the sense of it is deeper and more widely observed. It is one, however, outside the limits of these pages. Only that the aroma and delicacy of educated social intercourse do not permeate society as in that time is undoubted. Of course the impression existing in some minds of the widespread canker of profligacy and licentiousness then openly prevailing, is perverting of facts, since punctilio and the Court etiquette of the most punctilious of monarchs would not, and could not, have countenanced it. Such licence was indulged in by, and confined, as it is now, to a certain section of the “smart” community, and this possibly no such narrow one; but at least it was veiled then by certain elements of good taste, and some womanly graces now far to seek. Not then, as now, the motor craze made existence uglier; then as not now, the bold, inane stares and painted faces of many of the gentler sex frequenting the highways and byways, were mostly screened by masks, and an awkward gait was mantled. Some cultivation of expression, and a little more sense, if not wit, graced the tongues now devoted to slang and the misuse of words which hang about the higher education; while the clamour of ill-advised women without doors was unknown. The comments of a recent French