They were therefore chatting. At the first table, the king’s younger brother, Philip, Duc d’Anjou, was admiring his handsome face in the glass of a box. His favorite, the Chevalier de Lorraine, leaning over the back of the prince’s chair, was listening, with secret envy, to the Comte de Guiche, another of Philip’s favorites, who was relating in choice terms the various vicissitudes of fortune of the royal adventurer Charles II. He told, as so many fabulous events, all the history of his perigrinations in Scotland, and his terrors when the enemy’s party was so closely on his track, of nights spent in trees, and days spent in hunger and combats. By degrees, the fate of the unfortunate king interested his auditors so greatly, that the play languished even at the royal table, and the young king, with a pensive look and downcast eye, followed, without appearing to give any attention to it, the smallest details of this Odyssey, very picturesquely related by the Comte de Guiche. The Comtesse de Soissons interrupted the narrator: “Confess, count, you are inventing.” “Madame, I am repeating like a parrot all the stories related to me by different Englishmen. To my shame I am compelled to say, I am as exact as a copy.” “Charles II. would have died before he could have endured all that.” Louis XIV. raised his intelligent and proud head. “Madame,” said he, in a grave tone, still partaking something of the timid child, “monsieur le cardinal will tell you that during my minority the affairs of France were in jeopardy,—and that if I had been older, and obliged to take sword in hand, it would sometimes have been for the evening meal.” “Thanks to God,” said the cardinal, who spoke for the first time, “your majesty exaggerates, and your supper has always been ready with that of your servants.” The king colored. “Oh!” cried Philip, inconsiderately, from his place, and without ceasing to admire himself,—“I recollect once, at Melun, the supper was laid for nobody, and that the king ate two-thirds of a slice of bread, and abandoned to me the other third.” The whole assembly, seeing Mazarin smile, began to laugh. Courtiers flatter kings with the remembrance of past distresses, as with the hopes of future good fortune. “It is not to be denied that the crown of France has always remained firm upon the heads of its kings,” Anne of Austria hastened to say, “and that it has fallen off of that of the king of England; and when by chance that crown oscillated a little,—for there are throne-quakes as well as earthquakes,—every time, I say, that rebellion threatened it, a good victory restored tranquillity.” “With a few gems added to the crown,” said Mazarin. The Comte de Guiche was silent: the king composed his countenance, and Mazarin exchanged looks with Anne of Austria, as if to thank her for her intervention.