An author best known for his plagiarisms seized on Madame de Créquy as a likely old person to have left memoirs behind her. By aid of gossip and books he patched up the amusing but mythical records which he attributed to the lady. Why he selected the Earl as the lover of her girlhood we can only guess; but dates and facts make the pretty tale incredible, though it has found its way into Chambers’s account of the Earl’s career. Thus, for example, it is averred by Sainte-Beuve, on the authority of her man of business, M. Percheron, that Madame de Créquy was born in 1714. The love story of 1717, told in her Memoirs, beginning in the Earl’s attempt to teach her Spanish and English, and interrupted by the fact that he was a ‘Calvinist,’ is therefore improbable. The lady was but three years old when her affections, according to her apocryphal Memoirs, were blighted. The lovers met again, when the Earl was Prussian Ambassador at Versailles in 1753. ‘We had not had the time to discover each other’s faults, we had not suffered each by the other’s imperfections, both remained under that illusion which experience destroyed not: we were happy in the sweet thought of ineffable excellence, and when we met in the wane of life, and either saw the other’s white hair, we felt an emotion so pure, so tender, and so solemn, that no other sentiment, no other impression known to mortals, can be compared to it.’ All this is charming, but it cannot conceivably be true! The Earl composed his one madrigal under the influence of this elderly emotion (say the pseudo-Memoirs), a tear stole down his withered cheek, and he assured Madame de Créquy that they would meet in Heaven. ‘I loved you too much not to embrace your religion.’ So runs the romance of the pseudo-Madame Créquy. In fact, the Earl remained a member of the persecuted Episcopal Church in Scotland. In Rome a priest tried to convert him, beginning with the Trinity. ‘Your Lordship believes in the Trinity?’ ‘I do,’ said the Earl; ‘but that just fills up my measure. A drop more and I spill all.’ Madame de Créquy’s Mémoires are obviously a daring forgery, but the ‘violet of a legend’ has a fragrance of its own. The Earl was in 1716, as his portrait shows, a singularly handsome young man, with large hazel eyes and an eager face, with a complexion like a girl’s beneath his brown curls. Madame de Créquy is made to say, by way of giving local colour, that he greatly resembled a portrait of _le beau Caylus_, a favourite of Henri III. The portrait was in her family.