and married his
mistress, a servant-girl. Jeanne was born at the _chateau_ of
Fontette, near Bar-sur-Aube, on April 22, 1756, and she and her
brother and little sister starved in their mouldering tower, kept
alive by the charity of the neighbours and of the _cure_, who begged
clothes for these descendants of kings. But their scutcheon was--and
Jeanne never forgot the fact--argent, three _fleurs de lys_ or, on a
fesse azure. The _noblesse_ of the family was later scrutinised by the
famous d'Hozier and pronounced authentic. Jeanne, with bare feet, and
straws in her hair, is said to have herded the cows, a discontented
indolent child, often beaten by her peasant mother. When her father
had eaten up his last acre, he and the family tramped to Paris in
1760. As Jeanne was then but four years old, I doubt if she ever
'drove the cattle home,' as M. Funck-Brentano finds recorded in the
MSS. of the advocate Target, who defended Jeanne's victim, Cardinal
Rohan.

The Valois crew lived in a village near Paris. Jeanne's mother turned
Jeanne's father out of doors, took a soldier in his place, and sent
the child to beg daily in the streets. 'Pity a poor orphan of the
blood of Valois,' she piped; 'alms, in God's name, for two orphans of
the blood of Valois!' When she brought home little she was cruelly
flogged, so she says, and occasionally she deviated into the truth. A
kind lady, the Marquise de Boulainvilliers, investigated her story,
found it true, and took up the Valois orphans. The wicked mother went
back to Bar-sur-Aube, which Jeanne was to dazzle with her opulence,
after she got possession of the diamonds.

By the age of twenty-one (1777), Jeanne was a pretty enchanting girl,
with a heart full of greed and envy; two years later she and her
sister fled from the convent where her protectress had placed them: a
merry society convent it was. A Madame de Surmont now gave them
shelter, at Bar-sur-Aube, and Jeanne married, very disreputably, her
heavy admirer, La Motte, calling himself Count, and to all appearance
a stupid young officer of the _gendarmerie_. The pair lived as such
people do, and again made prey of Madame de Boulainvilliers, in 1781,
at Strasbourg. The lady was here the guest of the sumptuous, vain,
credulous, but honourable Cardinal Rohan, by this time a man of fifty,
and the fanatical adorer of Cagliostro, with his philosopher's stone,
his crystal gazers, his seeresses, his Egyptian mysteries, and his
powers of he