utterly
dissimilar, leaped together, as it were, through the indescribable
attraction of opposites. He was big and powerful; she was small and
fragile. He was merry, and full of quips and jests; she was reserved and
melancholy. Each felt in the other a need supplied.

At one of their earliest meetings the climax came. Saxe was not the
man to hesitate; while she already, in her thoughts, had made a full
surrender. In one great sweep he gathered her into his arms. It appeared
to her as if no man had ever laid his hand upon her until that moment.
She cried out:

"Now, for the first time in my life, I seem to live!"

It was, indeed, the very first love which in her checkered career was
really worthy of the name. She had supposed that all such things were
passed and gone, that her heart was closed for ever, that she was
invulnerable; and yet here she found herself clinging about the neck
of this impetuous soldier and showing him all the shy fondness and
the unselfish devotion of a young girl. From this instant Adrienne
Lecouvreur never loved another man and never even looked at any other
man with the slightest interest. For nine long years the two were bound
together, though there were strange events to ruffle the surface of
their love.

Maurice de Saxe had been sired by a king. He had the lofty ambition to
be a king himself, and he felt the stirrings of that genius which in
after years was to make him a great soldier, and to win the brilliant
victory of Fontenoy, which to this very day the French are never tired
of recalling. Already Louis XV. had made him a marshal of France; and a
certain restlessness came over him. He loved Adrienne; yet he felt that
to remain in the enjoyment of her witcheries ought not to be the whole
of a man's career.

Then the Grand Duchy of Courland--at that time a vassal state of Poland,
now part of Russia--sought a ruler. Maurice de Saxe was eager to secure
its throne, which would make him at least semi-royal and the chief of
a principality. He hastened thither and found that money was needed to
carry out his plans. The widow of the late duke--the Grand Duchess Anna,
niece of Peter the Great, and later Empress of Russia--as soon as she
had met this dazzling genius, offered to help him to acquire the duchy
if he would only marry her. He did not utterly refuse. Still another
woman of high rank, the Grand Duchess Elizabeth of Russia, Peter the
Great's daughter, made him very much the same prop