From this time Mademoiselle de Launay was looked upon by the duchess as a person whose opinion was of some consequence, and was admitted into her parties, and enjoyed her confidence. She now shared with Malezieu the task of supplying plans and verses for the spectacles at Sceaux. Her literary connections became more widely extended, and she had no lack of lovers. Among those who paid the most devoted homage to her, was the Abbé de Chaulieu; the passion, as she herself hints, could have been only platonic, for he was then verging on eighty, but she owns that she had “a despotic authority over everything in his house.” It must, however, be mentioned, to her honour, that she displayed a rare disinterestedness, and steadily refused presents from him, which would have tempted a woman of a common mind, especially under De Launay’s circumstances. The princely gift of a thousand pistoles, which the Abbé offered, would have saved her from the slavery, endured night after night, of reading a duchess to sleep, while her own health was endangered by want of rest. In the memorial which the Duchess of Maine drew up in behalf of the legitimated princes, she was assisted by De Launay. “I turned over,” says the latter, “the old chronicles, and the ancient and modern jurisconsults, till excessive fatigue disposed the princess to rest. Then came my reading, to lull her to sleep; and then I went to seek for slumber, which, however, I never found!” In the proceedings of the duchess, with respect to the Cellamare conspiracy, she was deeply implicated; a part at least of the correspondence passed through her hands. Her good sense anticipated, long before the event, what would be the final result. The storm burst at last. She was arrested on the 19th of December, 1718, and, three days after, was committed to the Bastile. With a truly philosophical spirit, she soon became reconciled to her fate. Luckily, she had an invaluable companion in her maid Rondel, faithful, affectionate, and acute, the very model of domestics. But it must not be concealed, that she had another consolation, to lighten her prison hours. She inspired two persons with an ardent attachment. One of these was a fellow prisoner, on the Cellamare score, the Chevalier de Menil; the other was the king’s lieutenant in the fortress, M. de Maisonrouge. Reason would have chosen the latter as the proper object of fondness; but her wayward heart decided in favour of the former. No writer has ever imagined a more elevated, devoted, self-sacrificing passion than that of Maisonrouge. He lived and breathed but for her; ever watchful to forerun all her wishes, having no delight but to behold and converse with her, he had even the magnanimity to convey her letters to Menil, and to bring about interviews, when he found that her heart was irrevocably bestowed on him. The catastrophe is painful. The favoured Menil, who had solemnly pledged himself to make her his wife, was no sooner set free than he proved