I have often walked about at night in the gallery of the château of Fontainebleau, where they say the ghost of the late king François I. appears; but the good man never did me the honour to appear to me; perhaps he does not think my prayers sufficiently efficacious to call him out of purgatory; and in that he may be right enough. I was very gay in my youth; that is why they called me in German _Rauschen petten Knecht_. I remember the birth of the King of England [George I.] as if it had been yesterday. I was a very roguish, inquisitive child. They put a doll in a clump of rosemary and tried to make me believe that it was the child that I was told my aunt was going to have; but just at that moment I heard her scream, which did not agree with the baby in the rosemary bush. I pretended that I believed them, but I slipped into my aunt's chamber as if I were playing hide and seek with young Bulau and Haxthausen, and hid behind a great screen they had placed beside the chimney next the door. Presently they brought the child to the fireplace to bathe it, and I ran out of my hiding-place. I ought to have been whipped, but in honour of the happy event I was only well scolded. The late king was so attached to the old customs of the royal family that he would not have allowed any of them to be changed for all the world. Mme. de Fiennes used to say that they clung so to old ways in the royal household that the queen died with a frilled cap on her head such as they tie on children when they put them to bed. When the king wished a thing he never allowed any one to argue against it; the thing he ordered must be done at once without reply. He was too used to "such is our good pleasure" to brook an observation. He was very severe in the etiquette he established about him. At Marly it was quite another thing; there he allowed no ceremony. Neither ambassadors nor envoys were invited to go there, and he never gave audiences; there was no etiquette, and everything went along pell-mell. On the promenades the king made the men wear their hats, and in the salon every one, down to the captains and sub-lieutenants of the foot-guards, was allowed to sit down. That gave me such a disgust for the salon that I never chose to stay there. My son is like all the rest of the family, he wants the things to which he has been accustomed from his youth to go on forever. That is why he cannot part with the Abbé Dubois, though he knows his knavery. That abbé wanted to persuade me, myself, that the marriage of my son was very advantageous for him. I replied: "And Honour, monsieur, what can repair that?" The Maintenon had made great promises to him and also to my son, but, thanks be to God, she did not keep her word to either of them. [Illustration: Infanta Maria Theresa wife of Louis XIV]