Voltaire asserts, in a note to the first edition of the _Souvenirs_ of Madame de Caylus, that, for the purpose of entering secretly into the apartment of the duchess, he had bought the two houses on either side of the Hôtel de Nevers. Saint-Simon goes much further and says that, to conceal their rendezvous, “he rented all the houses on one side of a street near Saint-Sulpice, furnished them, and pierced the connecting walls.” If we are to believe this anecdote, the Maréchal de Richelieu must have been but a feeble plagiarist when, many years later, he adopted a similar means of entrance into the Palais-Royal and the Hôtel de la Popelinière.[226] But since Saint-Sulpice, though close to the Hôtel de Condé, was a long way from the Hôtel de Nevers, we must confess that we do not quite see how such operations were to bring _Monsieur le Duc_ to the side of his beloved. Perhaps, however, Saint-Simon intends us to understand that, in order not to excite the least suspicion, the prince was in the habit of entering a house at one end of the street, and the lady one at the other extremity, and of meeting in the middle. Any way, it seems rather a tall story, even for Saint-Simon. Despite so many precautions, the Duc de Nevers scented treason, and resolved to escape it by the procedure which he usually adopted in such circumstances, namely, by carrying his wife off to Rome.[227] “M. de Nevers,” writes Madame de Caylus, “was in the habit of setting off for Rome in the same way as any one else would go out to supper; and Madame de Nevers had been known to enter her carriage in the persuasion that she was only going for a drive, and then to hear her husband say to the coachman: “To Rome.” In time, however, the lady began to know her husband better and to be more on her guard against him, and happening to discover his intention of taking her upon another of these sudden journeys, she promptly warned her lover and begged him to devise some means of averting, or, at any rate, of postponing, their threatened separation. Now, the Duc de Nevers, like all the Mancini, had a very pretty turn for verse-making, of which he was inordinately vain, and nothing delighted him more than to hear his poetical effusions recited before an appreciative audience. Aware of this little weakness, _Monsieur le Duc_ resolved to lay a trap for him, into which he felt convinced he could not fail to fall. But let us listen to Madame de Caylus: