igates on the
Scotch and Irish coasts.'

By 1759 Eleanor was, perhaps, weary of conspiring. Her daughter, the
Princesse de Ligne, was the fair patroness of that expedition which
Hawke crushed in Quiberon Bay, while Charles received the news at
Dunkirk.

All was ended. For seventy-two years the Oglethorpe women had used
their wit and beauty, through three generations, for a lost cause.
They were not more lucky, with the best intentions, than Eleanor's
grandson, the Prince de Lambesc. With hereditary courage he rescued an
old woman from a burning cottage, and flung her into a duck-pond to
extinguish her blazing clothes. The old woman was drowned!

Not long ago a lady of much wit, but of no occult pretensions, and
wholly ignorant of the Oglethorpes, looked over Westbrook Place, then
vacant, with the idea of renting it. On entering it she said, 'I have
a feeling that very interesting things have happened here'! Probably
they had.[40]

[Footnote 40: The facts are taken from Ailesbury's, de Luynes',
Dangeau's, and d'Argenson's _Memoirs_; from Boyer's _History_, and
other printed books, and from the Newcastle, Hearne, Carte, and
Gualterio MSS. in the Bodleian and the British Museum.]

XI

_THE CHEVALIER D'EON_

The mystery of the Chevalier d'Eon (1728-1810), the question of his
sex, on which so many thousand pounds were betted, is no mystery at
all. The Chevalier was a man, and a man of extraordinary courage,
audacity, resource, physical activity, industry, and wit. The real
mystery is the problem why, at a mature age (forty-two) did d'Eon take
upon him, and endure for forty years, the travesty of feminine array,
which could only serve him as a source of notoriety--in short, as an
advertisement? The answer probably is that, having early seized
opportunity by the forelock, and having been obliged, after an
extraordinary struggle, to leave his hold, he was obliged to clutch at
some mode of keeping himself perpetually in the public eye. Hence,
probably, his persistent assumption of feminine costume. If he could
be distinguished in no other way, he could shine as a mystery; there
was even lucre in the pose.[41]

[Footnote 41: The most recent work on d'Eon, _Le Chevalier d'Eon_, par
Octave Homberg and Fernand Jousselin (Plon-Nourrit, Paris, 1904), is
rather disappointing. The authors aver that at a recent sale they
picked up many MSS. of d'Eon 'which had lain for more than a century
in the back shop of an Englis