of which Voltaire writes--very incongruous, but decidedly splendid and comfortable. Stanislas had added the delightful "Bosquet," laid out for him by Gervais--overloading it, it is true, with kiosks and pavilions, renaissance architecture and renaissance statuary, a hermitage, and eventually with de Tressan's "Chartreuse." Like all persons of "taste" in his day, Stanislas loved gimcrackery; he had utilized François Richard's inventive genius for embellishing his principal residence with a unique contrivance, admired by all Europe--an artificial rock with clockwork machinery setting about eighty figures in motion. You may see a picture of it still in the Nancy Museum. It must have been very ingenious and very ugly. First, there was a miller's wife opening her casement-window to answer some supposed caller; then two cronies appear on the scene, engaging in a morning chat. A shepherd playing on his _musette_ leads his flock, tinkling with bells, across the rock. Two wethers engage in a real contest; a clockwork dog jumps up, barking, and separates them. There was a forge, with hammers beating and sparks flying. An insatiable tippler knocks at the closed door of the tavern, and is answered by the hostess with a pailful of water emptied upon his head from a window above. In the distance a pious hermit is seen telling his beads. And in the background is discovered, standing on a balcony, to crown the whole, the Queen, Catherine Opalinska, complacently looking down upon the scene, while two sentries pace solemnly up and down, occasionally presenting arms. Such were the toys of royalty in those days. Besides these two palaces Stanislas had others--Chanteheux, well in view from Lunéville, built in the Polish style: "rien de plus superbe, rien de plus irrégulier"; Einville, flat and level, disparaged by the duc de Luynes, but nevertheless grand, and possessing a "salon" famed for its magnificence throughout Europe; and lastly the historic Malgrange, close to Nancy, the "Sans souci" of Henri le Bon, in which Catherine of Bourbon had met the Roman doctors of divinity, despatched to convert her, in learned disputation, and sent them away discomfited, to the no little annoyance of her brother, Henri IV. Beyond this, Héré was at work beautifying Nancy in the Louis-Quinze style, with statuary and balustrades, gorgeous gateways, and magnificent arches; and he was building that handsome palace, which now serves as the Commanding General's quarters, in which, in 1814, when the Emperor of Austria, the last real Lorrain Duke's grandson, was lodged there, was hatched the Absolutist conspiracy of the "Holy Alliance."