hich he had
with regard to his deference for Germany, and they were all allowed to go
their own way.

A little later, it was discovered that there was a regular and active
correspondence between these young people in Germany and others who had
remained in Paris or at the Court. The first minister had a certain
page, one of the most agile, pursued; he was caught up with at Strasburg;
his valise was seized. The Marquis de Louvois, desiring to give the King
the pleasure of himself opening these mysterious letters, handed him the
budget, the seals intact, and his Majesty thanked him for this attention.
These thanks were the last that that powerful minister was destined to
receive from his master; his star waned from that hour, never again to
recover its lustre; all his credit failed and crashed to the ground. This
correspondence--spied on with so much zeal, surprised and carried off
with such good fortune--informed the astonished monarch that, in the
Louvois family, in his house and circle, his royal character, his
manners, his affections, his tastes, his person, his whole life, were
derisively censured. The beloved son-in-law of the minister, speaking
with an open heart to his friends, who were travelling, and absent,
represented the King to them as a sort of country-gentleman, given up now
to the domestic and uniform life of the manor-house, more than ever
devoted to his dame bourgeoise, and making love ecstatically at the feet
of this young nymph of fifty seasons.

M. de la Roche-Guyon and M. de Liancourt, sons of La Rochefoucauld, who
expressed themselves with the same boldness, went so far as to say of
their ruler that he was but a stage and tinsel king. The son-in-law of
Louvois accused him of being most courageous in his gallery, but of
turning pale on the eve, and at the moment, of an action; and
D'Alincourt, son of Villeroi, carried his outrages further still. No one
knows better than myself how unjust these accusations were, and are. I
was sensible of the mortification such a reading must have caused to the
most sensitive, the most irritable of princes; but I rejoiced at the
humiliation that the lady in waiting felt for her share in this
unpardonable correspondence. The annoyance that I read for some days on
her handsome face consoled me, for the time being, for her great success
at my expense.

Madame la Princesse de Conti, whom the King, up to this time, had not
only cherished but adored, found also, in those