to say, forts or fortresses ('freitas'). My father had been very
intimate with M. de la Trappe, and had taken me to him.

Although I was very young then, M. de la Trappe charmed me, and the
sanctity of the place enchanted me. Every year I stayed some days there,
sometimes a week at a time, and was never tired of admiring this great
and distinguished man. He loved me as a son, and I respected him as
though he were any father. This intimacy, singular at my age, I kept
secret from everybody, and only went to the convent clandestinely.

CHAPTER V

On my return from La Trappe, I became engaged in an affair which made a
great noise, and which had many results for me.

M. de Luxembourg, proud of his successes, and of the applause of the
world at his victories, believed himself sufficiently strong to claim
precedence over seventeen dukes, myself among the number; to step, in
fact, from the eighteenth rank, that he held amongst the peers, to the
second. The following are the names and the order in precedence of the
dukes he wished to supersede:

The Duc d'Elboeuf; the Duc de Montbazon; the Duc de Ventadour; the Duc de
Vendome; the Duc de la Tremoille; the Duc de Sully; the Duc de Chevreuse,
the son (minor) of the Duchesse de Lesdiguieres-Gondi; the Duc de
Brissac; Charles d'Albert, called d'Ailly; the Duc de Richelieu; the Duc
de Saint-Simon; the Duc de la Rochefoucauld; the Duc de la Force; the Duc
de Valentinois; the Duc de Rohan; the Duc de Bouillon.

To explain this pretension of M. de Luxembourg, I must give some details
respecting him and the family whose name he bore. He was the only son of
M. de Bouteville, and had married a descendant of Francois de Luxembourg,
Duke of Piney, created Peer of France in 1581. It was a peerage which,
in default of male successors, went to the female, but this descendant
was not heir to it. She was the child of a second marriage, and by a
first marriage her mother had given birth to a son and a daughter, who
were the inheritors of the peerage, both of whom were still living. The
son was, however, an idiot, had been declared incapable of attending to
his affairs, and was shut up in Saint Lazare, at Paris. The daughter had
taken the veil, and was mistress of the novices at the Abbaye-aux-Bois.
The peerage had thus, it might almost be said, become extinct, for it was
vested in an idiot, who could not marry (to prevent him doing so, he had
been made a deacon, and he was bound in cons