earned his strange credulity with respect to me. I began to feel my
position very irksome, not to say painful, on this account. Meudon I
would not go to--for me it was a place infested with demons--yet by
stopping away I ran great risks of losing the favour and consideration I
enjoyed at Court. Monseigneur was a man so easily imposed upon, as I had
already experienced, and his intimate friends were so unscrupulous that
there was no saying what might be invented on the one side and swallowed
on the other, to my discredit. Those friends, too, were, I knew, enraged
against me for divers weighty reasons, and would stop at nothing, I was
satisfied, to procure my downfall. For want of better support I
sustained myself with courage. I said to myself, "We never experience
all the evil or all the good that we have apparently the most reason to
expect." I hoped, therefore, against hope, terribly troubled it must be
confessed on the score of Meudon. At Easter, this year, I went away to
La Ferme, far from the Court and the world, to solace myself as I could;
but this thorn in my side was cruelly sharp! At the moment the most
unlooked-for it pleased God to deliver me from it.

At La Ferme I had but few guests: M. de Saint-Louis, an old brigadier of
cavalry, and a Normandy gentleman, who had been in my regiment, and who
was much attached to me. On Saturday, the 11th of the month, and the day
before Quasimodo, I had been walking with them all the morning, and I had
entered all-alone into my cabinet a little before dinner, when a courier
sent by Madame de Saint-Simon, gave me a letter from her, in which I was
informed that Monseigneur was ill!

I learnt afterwards that this Prince, while on his way to Meudon for the
Easter fetes, met at Chaville a priest, who was carrying Our Lord to a
sick person. Monseigneur, and Madame de Bourgogne, who was with him,
knelt down to adore the Host, and then Monseigneur inquired what was the
malady of the patient. "The small-pox," he was told. That disease was
very prevalent just then. Monseigneur had had it, but very lightly, and
when young. He feared it very much, and was struck with the answer he
now received. In the evening he said to Boudin, his chief doctor, "I
should not be surprised if I were to have the small-pox." The, day,
however, passed over as usual.

On the morrow, Thursday, the 9th, Monseigneur rose, and meant to go out
wolf-hunting; but as he was dressing, such a fit