One day Stanislas, much moved, entered the room where his wife and daughter were. “Let us kneel down,” he exclaimed, “and return thanks to God!”--“Father,” said Marie, “have you been called back to the throne of Poland?”--“Ah! daughter,” he replied, “Heaven is far more favorable to us than that. You are Queen of France.” It was not a dream. The exile’s daughter, the poor and obscure Princess, living on alms from the French court, who, but the day before, would have been happy to marry one of those who were now to be her principal officials, ascended as if by miracle the greatest throne in the world. How had she happened to be preferred to the ninety-nine marriageable princesses, a list of whom had been drawn up at Versailles? There was but this simple remark below her name in the list: “Nothing disadvantageous is known concerning this family.” Louis XV. who had sent back the daughter of a King of Spain could choose among the wealthiest and most highly placed princesses in Europe. How did they contrive to make him marry this poor Polish girl who brought him no dot and who was seven years his senior (in an inverse sense, the same difference of age that existed between him and the Infanta, his first betrothed)? It is true that a former secretary of embassy, Lozillières, whom the Duke of Bourbon had sent to make inquiries about twenty-seven princesses, had thus drawn the portrait of Marie Leczinska: “This Princess, as simple as the daughter of Alcinoüs, who knows no cosmetics but water and snow, and, seated between her mother and her grandmother, embroiders altar-cloths, recalls to us, in the commandery of Wissemburg, the artlessness of heroic times.” Was it this mythological style which affected sceptical and depraved souls like those of the Duke of Bourbon and his mistress, Madame de Prie? It was not this, at all events, which chiefly preoccupied them. If they selected Marie Leczinska, it was because they fancied that, owing her elevation solely to their caprice, she would esteem herself in their debt and be their tool. What pleased them in her was that she had no resources; that a price had been set upon her father’s head; that the exile, dispossessed of his throne for thirteen years, had wandered from asylum to asylum, in Turkey, in Sweden, in the principality of Deux-Ponts, and in Alsace; that the young girl was merely agreeable without being beautiful; that she was seven years older than Louis XV.; and that in calling her to the throne in the most unforeseen and inconceivable manner, the Duke and Madame de Prie would create for themselves exceptional claims upon her gratitude. Louis XV. was at this time the most beautiful youth in the kingdom. An ideal lustre illuminated his charming visage, and when they were praising the graces of her young betrothed to Marie Leczinska: “Alas!” said she, “you redouble my alarms.”