great-uncle history had taught his country the severe lesson, that without observing the best, though they be the most obsequious, relations towards France, at whose mercy the country lay, no Lorraine was possible. Accordingly, almost Leopold's very first act as Duke was to send M. de Couvange to Paris, to solicit on his behalf the hand of "Mademoiselle," the Princess of Orleans. Her hand was gladly accorded. There was a tradition--with a very obvious object--at Paris in favour of Lorrain marriages. This was the thirty-third, and there remained a thirty-fourth to conclude--the ill-starred marriage of Marie Antoinette. King James II. and his Queen attended the wedding at Fontainebleau, and Elizabeth Charlotte became one of the best of wives, and best and most popular of Lorraine duchesses, bearing her husband no less than fourteen children. Balancing between Austria and France, maintaining his private relations with the one, giving way in everything to the other, was Leopold's prudent maxim throughout his reign. So long as he adhered to that he felt himself safe. Whenever he departed from it, he found himself getting into mischief. Leopold has been much abused by our writers and politicians, as if he had been a deliberate anti-English plotter and Jacobite accomplice. It is but fair to him to explain why he afforded our Pretender such liberal hospitality. The real fact is, that he could not help himself. He was bound to. France demanded it, and he _could not_ refuse--nor yet refuse to make his hospitality generous and lavish. There was the additional attraction, indeed, of a show of importance, of a little implication in diplomatic negotiations and playing a part in European high politics, which to Leopold must have been strongly seductive. A good deal is also said about religious motives, the suggestion of which must have helped Leopold equally with the Curia and the Imperial Court, with both of whom he was anxious to stand well. The Pope--it is true, under pressure from James--subsequently thanked Leopold in a special brief, "_ample et bien exprimé_," for the proof of attachment which he had rendered to the Church by his reception of the English Pretender, the emblem to all Europe of the Church of Rome under persecution. Leopold was an exceptionally devout Roman Catholic. He heard mass religiously every day, spent an hour in prayer after dinner, and "adored the Sacrament" every evening. He had revived Charles III.'s stringent provisions against Protestants, interdicting all public worship and, in theory at any rate, declaring Protestantism a crime deserving of hanging. In his excessive zeal he would not even allow the Cistercian monks of Beaupré to retain in their service a Protestant shepherd, though they pleaded hard that he was the best shepherd whom they had ever had. So zealous a believer was of course a man after the very heart of the widow and son of that "_fort bon homme_," as