underclap in the ears of
Madame des Ursins, so long accustomed as she had been to govern and
domineer. Where to find one--one like Marie Louise of Savoy, who would
consent to retain her in the same functions, and who, like her, with
intelligence and firmness of mind, would have a boundless confidence in
her _camerara mayor_, and a docility proof against everything? Louis
XIV., being consulted, replied to his grandson that he gave him his
choice between a princess of Portugal, a princess of Bavaria, and a
princess of Parma. The first was greatly to the taste of the Castilians;
they had always had reason to praise their Portuguese queens, and they
attached to such choice hopes of renewed political unity for the Spanish
peninsula to the profit of Castile, which thus, by marriages, would
absorb, on the left, Portugal, as it had appropriated on the right, the
kingdom of Arragon. But the Court of the King of Portugal, the brother
of that princess, had been the rendezvous and the asylum of aristocratic
and Austrian opposition. These antecedents alarmed Madame des Ursins on
her own account, and did not appear much more assuring for Philip V. Was
it not known, on the other hand, that Portugal--especially since the
treaty of Utrecht, since the Bourbons had become, in spite of that
nation, the immutable possessors of Spain--dreaded those neighbouring
kings, after having previously loved them so much as liberators, and on
that account had placed herself under the protection of England, the
enemy of all the reigning branches of that powerful and ambitious house?

A marriage with the daughter of the Elector of Bavaria, of a firm ally
of Louis XIV. and Philip V., might well be the boon and the bond of an
old friendship, but could not procure for Spain any compensation for the
sacrifices imposed upon her by the terms of the recent peace.

The Princess of Parma, as a guarantee of security, if not of material
advantage, did not at the first glance seem more eligible. "Besides that
she was the issue of a double bastardy, of a pope on her father's side,
of a natural daughter of Charles V. on her mother's side, she was the
daughter of a petty duke of Parma and a thoroughly Austrian mother, who
was herself the sister of the dowager-empress, of the dowager-queen of
Spain, who was so unpopular that she was exiled; and further of the
Queen of Portugal, who had persuaded her husband to receive the Archduke
at Lisbon, and to carry the war into Sp