cessary to sustain the war,
and the conquests he intended to make; and this last project was,
perhaps, the motive power of all the rest. The madness of these schemes,
and his obstinacy in clinging to them, were not discovered until
afterwards. The astonishment then was great indeed, upon discovering the
poverty of the resources with which he thought himself capable of
carrying out these wild projects. Yet he had made such prodigious
preparations for war, that he had entirely exhausted the country without
rendering it able for a moment to oppose the powers of Europe.

Alberoni, abhorred in Spain as a cruel tyrant, in France, in England, in
Rome, and by the Emperor as an implacable and personal enemy, did not
seem to have the slightest uneasiness. Yet he might have had some, and
with good cause, at the very moment when he fancied himself most powerful
and most secure.

The Regent and the Abbe Dubois, who for a long time had only too many
reasons to regard Alberoni as their personal enemy, were unceasingly
occupied in silently plotting his fall; they believed the present moment
favourable, and did not fail to profit by it. How they did so is a
curious fact, which, to my great regret, has never reached me. M. le Duc
d'Orleans survived Dubois such a few months that many things I should
have liked to have gained information upon, I had not the time to ask him
about; and this was one.

All I know is, that what Alberoni always dreaded, at last happened to
him. He trembled, at every one, no matter of how little importance, who
arrived from Parma (the Queen of Spain, it has not been forgotten, was of
that Duchy); he omitted nothing by the aid of the Duke of Parma, and by
other means, to hinder the Parmesans from coming to Madrid; and was in
terror of the few of those whose journey he could not hinder, and whose
dismissal he could not obtain.

Among these few people there was nobody he feared so much as the Queen's
nurse, whom he drew up with a round turn occasionally, so to speak, but
less from policy than ill-temper. This nurse, who was a rough country-
woman of Parma, was named Donna Piscatori Laura. She had arrived in
Spain some years after the Queen, who had always liked her, and who made
her, shortly after her arrival, her 'assofeta', that is to say, her chief
'femme de chambre'; an office more considerable in Spain than with us.
Laura had brought her husband with her, a peasant in every way, seen and
known by n