tin came to fetch
them, placed the young girl in an apartment under the care of a female
attendant, and with the sister he went to meet at the hotel the German
artist to whom he gave fifty Louis for the portrait, and nothing to
Morphi. He only took her address, promising her that she would soon hear
from him; the next day she received one thousand Louis. The worthy German
gave me twenty-five louis for my portrait, with a promise to make a
careful copy of the one I had given to Patu, and he offered to paint for
me gratuitously the likeness of every girl of whom I might wish to keep a
portrait.

I enjoyed heartily the pleasure of the good Fleeting, when she found
herself in possession of the thousand gold pieces which she had received.
Seeing herself rich, and considering me as the author of her fortune, she
did not know how to shew me her gratitude.

The young and lovely O-Morphi--for the king always called her by that
name--pleased the sovereign by her simplicity and her pretty ways more
even than by her rare beauty--the most perfect, the most regular, I
recollect to have ever seen. He placed her in one of the apartments of
his Parc-dux-cerfs--the voluptuous monarch's harem, in which no one could
get admittance except the ladies presented at the court. At the end of
one year she gave birth to a son who went, like so many others, God knows
where! for as long as Queen Mary lived no one ever knew what became of
the natural children of Louis XV.

O-Morphi fell into disgrace at the end of three years, but the king, as
he sent her away, ordered her to receive a sum of four hundred thousand
francs which she brought as a dowry to an officer from Britanny. In 1783,
happening to be in Fontainebleau, I made the acquaintance of a charming
young man of twenty-five, the offspring of that marriage and the living
portrait of his mother, of the history of whom he had not the slightest
knowledge, and I thought it my duty not to enlighten him. I wrote my name
on his tablets, and I begged him to present my compliments to his mother.

A wicked trick of Madame de Valentinois, sister-in-law of the Prince of
Monaco, was the cause of O-Morphi's disgrace. That lady, who was well
known in Paris, told her one day that, if she wished to make the king
very merry, she had only to ask him how he treated his old wife. Too
simple to guess the snare thus laid out for her, O-Morphi actually asked
that impertinent question; but Louis XV. gave her a look