ier. His fifty years and gray hairs made him
enjoy among women the confidence inspired by mature age, although he had
not given up the thought of love affairs. He talked of his native
mountains with enthusiasm. He would at any time sing the "Ranz des
Vaches" with tears in his eyes, and was the best story-teller in the
Comtesse Jules's circle. The last new song or 'bon mot' and the gossip of
the day were the sole topics of conversation in the Queen's parties. Wit
was banished from them. The Comtesse Diane, more inclined to literary
pursuits than her sister-in-law, one day, recommended her to read the
"Iliad" and "Odyssey." The latter replied, laughing, that she was
perfectly acquainted with the Greek poet, and said to prove it:

"Homere etait aveugle et jouait du hautbois."

(Homer was blind and played on the hautboy.)

[This lively repartee of the Duchesse de Polignac is a droll imitation of
a line in the "Mercure Galant." In the quarrel scene one of the lawyers
says to his brother quill: 'Ton pere etait aveugle et jouait du
hautbois.']

The Queen found this sort of humour very much to her taste, and said that
no pedant should ever be her friend.

Before the Queen fixed her assemblies at Madame de Polignac's, she
occasionally passed the evening at the house of the Duc and Duchesse de
Duras, where a brilliant party of young persons met together. They
introduced a taste for trifling games, such as question and answer,
'guerre panpan', blind man's buff, and especially a game called
'descampativos'. The people of Paris, always criticising, but always
imitating the customs of the Court, were infected with the mania for these
childish sports. Madame de Genlis, sketching the follies of the day in
one of her plays, speaks of these famous 'descampativos'; and also of the
rage for making a friend, called the 'inseparable', until a whim or the
slightest difference might occasion a total rupture.

CHAPTER VIII.

The Duc de Choiseul had reappeared at Court on the ceremony of the King's
coronation for the first time after his disgrace under Louis XV. in 1770.
The state of public feeling on the subject gave his friends hope of seeing
him again in administration, or in the Council of State; but the opposite
party was too firmly seated at Versailles, and the young Queen's influence
was outweighed, in the mind of the King, by long-standing prejudices; she
therefore gave up for ever her attempt to reinstate the Du