Away down in the provinces, mouldering in a castle on the banks of the Meuse, lived a lady named the Comtesse de Béarn. A lady of the old _régime_, a litigant with a suit pending before the courts in Paris, poor as Job, proud as Lucifer, and seemingly created by Providence for the purpose of the presentation. This lady had been brought to Paris by a trick, installed in the town house of Madame Dubarry, and wheedled into consenting to act as sponsor by pure and rank bribery. One can fancy the consternation of the Choiseul party when this news leaked out. The presentation was assured; nothing, one might fancy, could possibly happen to prevent it, and yet to-night, standing with the Duchess to receive their guests, the face of Choiseul showed nothing of his threatened defeat. The Rue de Faubourg St. Honoré was alight with the torches of the running footmen and filled with a crowd watching the carriages turning into the courtyard of the Hôtel de Choiseul from the direction of the Rue St. Honoré, the Rue de la Bonne Morue, the Rue d’Anjou, and the Rue de la Madeleine. It was a great assemblage, for the Court for the moment was in Paris, the King having changed his residence for three days, returning to Versailles on the morrow, and the people, with that passion for display which helped them at times to forget their misery and hunger, watched the passing liveries of the Duc de Richelieu, M. de Duras, M. de Sartines, the Duc de Grammont, and the host of other notabilities, content if by the torchlight they caught a glimpse of some fair face, the glimmer of a jewel, or the ribbon of an order. The Maréchal de Richelieu’s carriage had drawn away from the steps, having set down its illustrious occupant, when another carriage drew up, from which stepped two young men. The first to alight was short, dark, with a face slightly pitted with smallpox, and so repellent, that at first sight the mind recoiled from him. Yet such was the extraordinary vigour and personality behind that repulsive face that men, and more especially women, forgot the ugliness in the hypnotism of the power. This was the celebrated Comte Camus, a descendant of Nicholas Camus, who had arrived in France penniless in the reign of Louis XIII., married his daughter to Emery, superintendent of finance, and died leaving to his heirs fifteen million francs. The gentleman with him, tall, fair complexioned, and with a laughing, devil-may-care face, marred somewhat by a sword-cut on the right side reaching from cheek-bone to chin, was the Comte de Rochefort. Rochefort was only twenty-five, an extraordinary person, absolutely fearless, always fighting, one of those characters that, like opals, seem compounded of cloud and fire. Generous, desperate in his love and hate, a rake-hell and a roué, open-handed when his fist was not clenched, and always laughing, he was fittingly summed up in the words of his cousin, the Abbé du Maurier, “It grieves me to think that such a man should be damned.”