But this crown was the cause of a tragic and apparently mysterious occurrence. When the Princess of Modena passed through France on her way to England, where she was about to become the wife of the Duke of York, Louis gave her a costly reception, nothing on his part being left undone to make her brief sojourn at his Court as enjoyable as possible. It happened that the conversation turned on the forms and fashions of jewellery, which prompted the Marquis de Dangeau, who prided himself on his antiquarian knowledge, to observe that it was in the time of Nero the imperial crown was first arched, whereupon Louis added that he possessed one himself, and which the Marchioness de Montespan would produce. In due time the glittering circlet was brought forth to excite universal admiration; but when Louis obtained a close view of it, he exclaimed to the Marchioness, “How is this, madam? This is no longer my crown of Agrippina; all the stones have been changed.” The setting was intact, but the brilliants had been replaced by paste. The mystery was before long solved, it being proved that the maker of the casket had affected an attachment for one of the waiting-women of the Marchioness de Montespan, who during his visits, having free access to where the crown of Agrippina was kept, had substituted the mock for the true diamonds. He was convicted and hanged, upon which occasion Louis XIV. remarked to the Duchess, “He has at least left us the setting, but Cromwell would have seized it whole.”[63] The Elector Frederick, surnamed “the Wise,” was an indefatigable collector of relics. After his death one of the monks employed by him solicited payment for several parcels he had purchased for “the wise Elector; but the times had changed. He was advised to give over this business. The relics for which he desired payment, it was argued, they were willing to return; that the price had fallen considerably since the Reformation of Luther; and that they would be more esteemed and find a better market in Italy than in Germany.”[64] The only expensive personal fancy, it is said, of Frederick the Great was for collecting snuff-boxes, of which he left as many as one hundred and thirty, valued at one million three hundred thousand dollars. Lord Malmesbury says that “one could hardly approach the King without sneezing.” Two thousand pounds weight of Spanish snuff had always to be kept in store. Smoking, on the other hand, says Vehse,[65] “was an abomination to Frederick ever since the tobacco in his father’s time.” A female sovereign who indulged in this habit was Catherine II. of Russia. And in the reign of Alexis the penalty for a man who smoked a pipe of tobacco was to have his nose cut off. This sovereign seems to have had a great dislike of tobacco, but times were to change, and a well-known portrait of Peter the Great represents him sitting in a sailor’s dress enjoying a pipe.