brilliant
and disdainful English lady who replaced this poor tragic muse in
the Margrave's heart, though the lady herself lived to be the last
Margravine of Ansbach, where everybody seems to have hated her with a
passion which she doubtless knew how to return. She was the daughter
of the Earl of Berkeley, and the wife of Lord Craven, a sufficiently
unfaithful and unworthy nobleman by her account, from whom she was
living apart when the Margrave asked her to his capital. There she set
herself to oust Mlle. Clairon with sneers and jests for the theatrical
style which the actress could not outlive. Lady Craven said she was
sure Clairon's nightcap must be a crown of gilt paper; and when Clairon
threatened to kill herself, and the Margrave was alarmed, "You forget,"
said Lady Craven, "that actresses only stab themselves under their
sleeves."

She drove Clairon from Ansbach, and the great tragedienne returned to
Paris, where she remained true to her false friend, and from time
to time wrote him letters full of magnanimous counsel and generous
tenderness. But she could not have been so good company as Lady Craven,
who was a very gifted person, and knew how to compose songs and sing
them, and write comedies and play them, and who could keep the Margrave
amused in many ways. When his loveless and childless wife died he
married the English woman, but he grew more and more weary of his dull
little court and his dull little country, and after a while, considering
the uncertain tenure sovereigns had of their heads since the French King
had lost his, and the fact that he had no heirs to follow him in his
principality, he resolved to cede it for a certain sum to Prussia. To
this end his new wife's urgence was perhaps not wanting. They went to
England, where she outlived him ten years, and wrote her memoirs.

The custodian of the Schloss came at last, and the Marches saw instantly
that he was worth waiting for. He was as vainglorious of the palace as
any grand-monarching margrave of them all. He could not have been more
personally superb in showing their different effigies if they had been
his own family portraits, and he would not spare the strangers a single
splendor of the twenty vast, handsome, tiresome, Versailles-like
rooms he led them through. The rooms were fatiguing physically, but so
poignantly interesting that Mrs. March would not have missed, though she
perished of her pleasure, one of the things she saw. She had for once