ed me
terribly. The next day the guest was a monk who talked literature, and
spoke a thousand follies against Voltaire, whom I then much admired, and
against the "Esprit des Lois," a favourite work of mine, which the cowled
idiot refused to attribute to Montesquieu, maintaining it had been
written by a monk. He might as well have said that a Capuchin created the
heavens and the earth.

On the day following Madame d'Urfe asked me to dine with the Chevalier
d'Arzigny, a man upwards of eighty, vain, foppish, and consequently
ridiculous, known as "The Last of the Beaus." However, as he had moved in
the court of Louis XIV., he was interesting enough, speaking with all the
courtesy of the school, and having a fund of anecdote relating to the
Court of that despotic and luxurious monarch.

His follies amused me greatly. He used rouge, his clothes were cut in the
style which obtained in the days of Madame de Sevigne, he professed
himself still the devoted lover of his mistress, with whom he supped
every night in the company of his lady friends, who were all young and
all delightful, and preferred his society to all others; however, in
spite of these seductions, he remained faithful to his mistress.

The Chevalier d'Arzigny had an amiability of character which gave
whatever he said an appearance of truth, although in his capacity of
courtier truth was probably quite unknown to him. He always wore a
bouquet of the most strongly-smelling flowers, such as tuberoses,
jonquils, and Spanish jasmine; his wig was plastered down with
amber-scented pomade, his teeth were made of ivory, and his eyebrows dyed
and perfumed, and his whole person exhaled an odour to which Madame
d'Urfe did not object, but which I could scarcely bear. If it had not
been for this drawback I should probably have cultivated his society. He
was a professed Epicurean, and carried out the system with an amazing
tranquillity. He said that he would undertake to receive twenty-four
blows with the stick every morning on the condition that he should not
die within the twenty-four hours, and that the older he grew the more
blows he would gladly submit to. This was being in love with life with a
vengeance.

Another day I dined with M. Charon, who was a counsellor, and in charge
of a suit between Madame d'Urfe and her daughter Madame du Chatelet, whom
she disliked heartily. The old counsellor had been the favoured lover of
the marchioness forty years before, and he though