Old Philippe the Regent was misgoverning France just then; and to say that his court was morally rotten would be gross flattery. The unapproachable Lecouvreur was thus a freak, as well as a delight. Like the good, old, overworked "breath of mountain air in a slum," this loveless genius swept through the palaces of Paris and Versailles. A hundred nobles longed for her favor. Not one could boast that he had so much as kissed her lips. Here is her picture, sketched from the ~Mercure~, of 1719: Without being tall, she is exquisitely formed and has an air of distinction. No one on earth has greater charm. Her eyes speak as eloquently as her lips, and often they supply the place of words. In brief, I can compare her only to a flawless miniature. Her head is well poised on shapely shoulders. Her eyes are full of fire; her mouth is pretty; her nose slightly aquiline. Her face is wonderfully adapted to express joy, tenderness, pity, fear, sorrow. And Adrienne? Her opinion of all this adulation is summed up in one sentence from a letter she wrote: I spend three-fourths of my time in doing what bores me. Among her maddest admirers was a wizened, monkey-faced youth who even then was writing anarchistic doctrines that one day were to help shake France's worm-eaten old monarchy to its fall. He was Francois Marie Arouet. But for reasons best known to himself, he preferred to be known simply as "Voltaire"--a name to which he had no right whatever, but by which alone history remembers him. Voltaire was Adrienne Lecouvreur's adoring slave. She treated him only as a dear friend; but she loved to hear his vitriolic anathemas on government, the aristocracy, and theology. He was in the midst of one of these harangues, at her rooms one evening, when the Chevalier de Rohan--bearer of the proudest name in all Europe--sauntered in. He eyed the monkey-like Voltaire in amused disfavor; then drawled, to no one in particular: "Who is this young man who talks so loud?" "A young man, sir," retorted Voltaire, "who is not forced to stagger along under a name far too great for him; but who manages to secure respect for the name he has." De Rohan's tasseled cane swung aloft. Adrienne tactfully prevented its fall by collapsing in a stage faint. But the incident did not close there. Next day Voltaire was set upon by ruffians in Rohan's pay, and beaten half to death. The victim did not complain. There was no justice for a commoner, in France at that time, against a member of the ~haute noblesse~. So Voltaire contented himself by going to a fencing master and practicing for a year or more in the use of the small-sword. At the end of that period, he challenged Rohan to mortal combat. Rohan professed to regard the challenge as a piece of insolence, and, through royal favor, had Voltaire, sent, by ~lettre de cachet~, to the Bastille. There was no chance for redress. And, on his release, Voltaire prudently let the feud drop.