Behold Madame de la Tournelle Duchess de Châteauroux. She is officially presented in this quality to the Queen, who says to her, in a kindly way: “Madame, I compliment you on the grace accorded to you by the King.” The Duke de Richelieu is rewarded for his zeal by the post of first gentleman of the chamber. The new duchess thrones it at Versailles. She keeps two of her sisters near her, the Marquise de Flavacourt, who is, like herself, one of the Queen’s ladies of the palace, and the Duchess de Lauraguais, of whom she makes an assiduous companion. Neither of them is pretty enough to make her jealous. She uses them as allies. Louis XV. isolates himself in the society of these three women, who have combined to keep him under the yoke. He amuses himself by giving them nicknames. He calls Madame de Flavacourt the Hen, on account of her frightened air, and the Duchess de Lauraguais _la Rue des Mauvaises-Paroles_, on account of her caustic speeches. Could anything great or noble proceed from this coterie? Is it true, that, as the Goncourts have said, “Madame de Châteauroux unites the energies and ambitions of a Longueville to the ardors and haughty insolence of a Montespan?” Is it true that in her pride, her impatience, the fever of her desires, the activity of her projects, the passion of her spirit, she has the fire of a “Fronde as well as the soul of a great reign?” We do not believe it. To judge from the Memoirs of the Duke de Luynes, so impartial a witness, so exact a narrator, the Duchess de Châteauroux was not a political woman, and still less a heroine. He depicts her as dull, indolent, taciturn, bored. “She and her sister,” he says, “spend the day in an armchair; and except in her week, Madame de Lauraguais generally goes out for the first time at eight or nine o’clock in the evening.... The King is with the two sisters as often as possible, and it appears that there is never any question of important matters between the three. Madame de Mailly would not have been so indifferent.”