Madame de Coislin was a woman of the grandest air. She was nearly eighty years of age, and her proud and domineering eyes bore an expression of wit and irony. Madame de Coislin was in no way lettered, and took pride in the fact; she had passed through the Voltairean age without being aware of it; if she had conceived any idea of it whatever, it was that of a time of a voluble middle-class. Not that she ever spoke of her birth; she was too great to make herself ridiculous: she very well knew how to see "small people" without compromising her rank; but, after all, she was born of the Premier Marquis of France[662]. If she was descended from Drogon de Nesle, killed in Palestine in 1096; from Raoul de Nesle[663], the Constable, knighted by Louis IX.; from Jean II. de Nesle, Regent of France during the last crusade of St. Louis, Madame de Coislin vowed that this was a stupidity on the part of fate for which she ought not to be held responsible; she was naturally of the Court, as others, more happy, are of the streets, as one may be a thorough-bred mare or a cab-hack: she could not help this accident, and had no choice but to endure the ill with which Heaven had been pleased to afflict her. Had Madame de Coislin had relations with Louis XV.? She never owned so much to me: she admitted, however, that she had been very much loved, but she pretended that she had treated the royal lover with the utmost harshness. "I have seen him at my feet," she would say to me; "he had charming eyes, and his language was seductive. He offered one day to give me a porcelain dressing-table, like that which Madame de Pompadour had. "'Oh, Sire,' cried I, 'then I must use it to hide under!'" By a singular chance I came across this dressing-table at the Marchioness Conyngham's in London; she had received it from George IV., and showed it to me with amusing simplicity.