In connection with jests and jesters near the Church, I could not well avoid mentioning this festival, where the buffoons exceeded any license assumed by official fools in royal and imperial courts. There are, however, so many well-known works or essays devoted to this matter, that I gladly leave the subject, trusting that if there be a reader who has gone with me thus far, he will accompany me through one more chapter before we finally part. PRINCES WHO HAVE BEEN THEIR OWN FOOLS. Although I have made almost an encyclopædia of notes touching exalted personages who, since the decline or the suppression of official fools, have shown a disposition to perform the office on their own account, neither my space nor my sympathy for the persevering reader who has thus far accompanied me, will admit of my placing a hundredth part of them before the public. A few instances, however, I will at once proceed to give, only premising, that it was lucky for a people when the Prince, in playing the Fool, enacted his part without inflicting anything very detrimental upon his subjects. Among those whose follies may be said to have been comparatively harmless, is to be reckoned that Prince who was called the Fool of his Health, namely, Ferdinand II., Grand Duke of Tuscany, who died in 1670, and was remarkable for the anxiety with which he attended to his health. “I have frequently seen him,” says the Abbé Arnauld, “pacing up and down his chamber between two large thermometers, upon which he would keep his eyes constantly fixed, unceasingly employed in taking off and putting on a variety of skull-caps of different degrees of warmth, of which he had always five or six in his hand, according to the degree of heat or cold registered by the instruments. This, I can assure you, was a mighty pleasant sight to behold, for there was not a conjuror in all his dominions more dexterous in handling his cups and balls than was this prince in shifting his caps.” If this was silly, it at least was in better taste than characterized the proceeding of the Princess of the Asturias, at Madrid, when Saint-Simon took ceremonious leave of her before he returned to France, in 1722. In full court, and to all his formal compliments and speeches, her Royal Highness only replied by a loud rattling noise in the trachea, which she repeated as he concluded each of his addresses to her. The poor Duke was stupefied, but the court was in fits of laughter, and hilariously admired the jest.