as an important precedent in my favor,
that the Queen-mother had always kissed the princesses of the blood"; and
so on through many pages. Thus lapsed her youth of frolics into an old age
of cards.

It is a slight compensation, that this very pettiness makes her chronicles
of the age very vivid in details. How she revels in the silver brocades,
the violet-colored velvet robes, the crimson velvet carpets, the purple
damask curtains fringed with gold and silver, the embroidered _fleurs de
lis_, the wedding-caskets, the cordons of diamonds, the clusters of
emeralds _en poires_ with diamonds, and the Isabelle-colored linen,
whereby hangs a tale! She still kept up her youthful habit of avoiding the
sick-rooms of her kindred, but how magnificently she mourned them when
they died! Her brief, genuine, but quite unexpected sorrow for her father
was speedily assuaged by the opportunity it gave her to introduce the
fashion of gray mourning, instead of black; it had previously, it seems,
been worn by widows only. Servants and horses were all put in deep black,
however, and "the court observed that I was very _magnifique_ in all my
arrangements." On the other hand, be it recorded, that our Mademoiselle,
chivalrous royalist to the last, was the only person at the French court
who refused to wear mourning for the usurper Cromwell!

But, if thus addicted to funeral pageants, it is needless to say that
weddings occupied their full proportion of her thoughts. Her schemes for
matrimony fill the larger portion of her history, and are, like all the
rest, a diamond necklace of great names. In the boudoir, as in the field,
her campaigns were superb, but she was cheated of the results. Her picture
should have been painted, like that of Justice, with sword and scales,--
the one for foes, the other for lovers. She spent her life in weighing
them,--monarch against monarch, a king in hand against an emperor in the
bush. We have it on her own authority, which, in such matters, was
unsurpassable, that she was "the best match in Europe, except the Infanta
of Spain." Not a marriageable prince in Christendom, therefore, can hover
near the French court, but this middle-aged sensitive-plant prepares to
close her leaves and be coy. The procession of her wooers files before our
wondering eyes, and each the likeness of a kingly crown has on: Louis
himself, her bright possibility of twenty years, till he takes her at her
own estimate and prefers the Infanta,