Those forty devices and their explanation were an ever fresh subject of gallant conversation in the towns through which she passed. Amid it all, Marguerite, then in the full bloom of her twenty-fourth year, went her way, winning all hearts, seducing the governors of citadels, and persuading them to useful treachery. On this journey she meets with charming Flemish scenes which she pictures delightfully. Take, for example, the gala festival at Mons, where the beautiful Comtesse de Lalain (Marguerite, Princesse de Ligne), whose beauty and rich costume are described most particularly, has her child brought to her in swaddling-clothes and suckles it before the company; “which,” remarks Marguerite, “would have been an incivility in any one else; but she did it with such grace and simplicity, like all the rest of her actions, that she received as much praise as the company did pleasure.” Leaving Namur, we have at Liège a touching and pathetic story of a poor young girl, Mlle. de Tournon, who dies of grief for being slighted and betrayed by her lover, to whom she was going in the utmost confidence; and who himself, coming to a better mind too late, rushes to console her, and finds her coffin on arrival. We have here from Queen Marguerite’s pen the finished sketch of a tale in the style of Mme. de La Fayette, just as above we had the drawing of a perfect little Flemish picture. On her return from this journey, the scenes Marguerite passes through at Dinant prove her coolness and presence of mind, and present us with another Flemish picture, but not so graceful as that of Mons and the beautiful nursing countess; this time it is a scene of public drunkenness, grotesque burgher rioting, and burgomasters in their cups. A painter need only transfer and copy the very lines which Marguerite has so happily traced, to make a faithful picture. After these journeys, being now reunited at her house of La Fère in Picardy with her dear brother d’Alençon, she realizes there for nearly two months, “which were to us” she says, “like two short days,” one of those terrestrial paradises which were at all times the desire of her imagination and of her heart. She loved beyond all things those spheres of enchantment, those Fortunate Isles, alike of Urania and of Calypso, and she was ever seeking to reproduce them in all places and under all forms, whether at her Court at Nérac or amid the rocks of Usson, or, at the last, in that beautiful garden on the banks of the Seine (which to-day is the Rue des Petits-Augustins) where she strove to cheat old age.