nounced the ambition of making her his tool, and was satisfied with being her right hand in governing the state. How high his ambition soared may be guessed from the following trait. Once, when conversing with Anne of Austria, emboldened by that gracious abandon of manner which made the haughty Spaniard so charming in her amiable moods, Mazarin alluded to the boyish passion of the king for his niece, Marie Mancini, and observed how deeply he would have deplored it had his majesty, yielding to the infatuation of the hour, committed the chivalrous folly of marrying her. Anne of Austria drew herself up with all the pride of her Castilian blood, and answered: "Had my son been capable of such an unworthiness, I should have placed myself with his brother at the head of the nation against him and against you." The proud daughter of kings, who, by the strength of her solitary will, could govern a nation and cow the daring leaders of the Fronde, was in person as tender and delicate as a child; her health was fragile, and her skin so sensitive that it was difficult to find any cambric soft enough to clothe without hurting her. Mazarin, alluding once to this Sybarite delicacy of temperament, declared to the regent that her purgatory in the next world would be to sleep in Holland sheets. Yet, when Anne was attacked by the cruel malady which ended her days, no Roman matron could have endured it with greater fortitude. Her piety, which had guarded her youth through the alluring temptations of the court, despite the neglect and rudeness of a morose and heartless husband, sustained her in the protracted tortures of her last illness. Shortly before she expired, Louis XIV. was kneeling by the bedside of his mother, weeping bitterly, and covering her hand with

his tears; she drew it gently away, and, looking for a moment at that hand which had been her chief woman's vanity, she murmured: "They are beginning to swell; it is time to go!" Some historians have flippantly taxed Anne with having systematically kept her son in the background, and sacrificed him selfishly to the prolongation of her own power; but Louis' passionate grief at her death, and his lifelong gratitude to the memory of his mother, sufficiently repudiate this charge. Louis XIV. never resided at the Palais Royal after her death; when necessity obliged him to remain in Paris, he occupied the Louvre.

The characters and careers of Richelieu and Mazarin furnish one of those points of comparison which history is so fond of. Richelieu was undeniably the more brilliant statesman of the two; he was endowed with greater originality and a larger breadth of view; he left a deeper impress on his time, and his remote action on France was more enduring; but if the achievement of peace be more valuable to a people than the prosecution of war, Mazarin has paramount claims on the gratitude of his country. The Treaty of Westphalia, and the Peace of the Pyrenees, are two monuments raised by Mazarin to his own fame that out-top all the dazzling trophies of his predecessors, and establish a nobler claim to the admiration of the civilized world than all Richelieu's victorious accomplishments in war. Both statesmen were pre-eminently gifted with that power of reading men which is so serviceable an agent in the hands of those who are called to govern. It was this electric instinct which prompted Richelieu to single out Mazarin from the crowd as the man best fitted to be his successor-a choice which the young Italian justified by carrying

out with unswerving fixity of purpose the vast unfinished designs of the patron whom death had cut short in the midst of his work. Mazarin, on the other hand, gave a striking proof of this same subtle insight when he said of the young king, then a mere boy in his mother's leading-strings, and as yet having done nothing to reveal the future grand monarch: "There is stuff enough in him to make four kings and one honest man." Both ministers set their influence and power above the interest and authority of the sovereign; but both labored with unflinching steadiness of aim to raise the monarchy to a height of splendor it had never before reached, and was not destined long to retain. Both carried their soutane with more of martial dignity than priestly gravity-that soutane of which Richelieu boasted: "I mow down everything, I upset everything, and then I cover it all with my red soutane." Both made it the business of their lives while at the head of the state to humble Austria and Spain, and both succeeded. The marriage of Louis XIV. with the Infanta of Spain was one of Mazarin's most successful diplomatic acts; he foresaw in this union the probable succession of the Bourbons to the crown of Charles Quint. But alongside of his many services to his country, there is one act of his that goes far to annul them-this was his introduction of gambling into France. To this deplorable importation the Abbé St. Pierre traces, not perhaps without a shade of exaggeration, but with palpable logic, the rapid decadence of the national morals and character; he says that Mazarin inoculated the young king with the passion for games of hazard, in order to keep his mind aloof from things in which it became him better to be interested, and thereby to prevent his interference in the affairs of

state; the regent, in her turn, became smitten with the novel mania, and would spend whole nights with her court playing cards. Mazarin himself was an incorrigible gambler, and often devoted to this passion the hours he should have given to sleep after his day's arduous task. He was looked upon more as a player of doubtful honesty-" un joueur pius que suspect"; but "who aliowed others in turn to cheat him, provided they did it cleverly," St. Pierre tells us; and he goes on to say: "The young nobles, first at court, and then all over the country, followed his example, and took to card-playing; they forsook the athletic sports and manly amusements which had delighted their fathers, and gave themselves up to this enervating and ruinous passion; they became weaker, more ignorant, and less polished; women caught the fever, and grew to respect themselves less, and to be less respected." Mazarin's avarice was as insatiable as his ambition; he died colossally rich; but during his last illness, seized with remorse, he made over all his unjust gains to the king, who, of course, refused to accept them, and the cardinal then divided his vast wealth between Louis, the queen, Condé, Turenne, his friend Louis de Haro, and several members of his own family. He bequeathed a large sum for the foundation of a college, which he also endowed with his splendid library, re-collected after its dispersion by the Frondeurs at immense trouble and expense. He wished this college to be called Collége des quatre nations, destining it chiefly for the education of young men belonging to the four provinces annexed to France during his ministry-Pignerol, Alsace, Roussillon, and Artois. Le Tellier, who was his executor, punctually obeyed all his instructions except the last-named. By

desire of the king, it was called Collége Mazarin, which was to become the magnificent Bibliothèque Royale of to-day.

Henrietta Maria of England occupied the Palais Royal in 1644. The marriage of her daughter Henrietta to Philip of Orleans, then Duc d'Anjou, was celebrated here with great pomp, and here the young princess held a brilliant court for a few years, while her mother dwelt in the cloistered retreat of Chaillot. The thread of this bright young life was suddenly snapped asunder. Bossuet's "O night of horror!" came like a thunderbolt from a summer sky, scattering the volatile court, and spreading the news of its loss over the whole of France. Then came the Regency, which was to add a chapter of such dark and lamentable notoriety to the history of the Palais Royal. The nephew of Louis XIV. inherited all the vices and foibles of his race with out any of their redeeming qualities. His selfish, easy-going bonhomie has been sometimes lauded as clemency; but it may more justly be considered a combination of weakness and cynical contempt for the claims of justice. When the enraged populace gather ed before his palace, dragging three naked corpses-the victims of their legitimate but misplaced anger along with them, the regent looked out at the tempestuous scene, and remarked coolly: "The mob are right; the wonder is they bear so much from us." And truly it was a wonder; and if the Revolution of '93 did not break out under the lawless and exasperating rule of the Regency, it must only have been because, as St. Simon explained it, "three things are necessary to make a revolution: leaders, brains, and funds, none of which were to be found in France at this period." The petits soupers de la Régence, which have acquired an infa

mous celebrity through all the chronicles of the time, can have no place in our sketch.

The visit of Peter the Great broke in on the luxurious and effeminate court of the Palais Royal like a Spartan appearing suddenly in the midst of a banquet of Sybarites. Peter, who had "civilized his people by cutting their heads off," set his heart on visiting France during the preced. ing reign; but Louis XIV., partly from an insurmountable antipathy to the semi-barbarous autocrat, partly from political motives, had signified to his brother of all the Russias that his absence would be more agreeable than his presence. Peter was compelled, therefore, to wait until the Grand Monarque had rejoined his ancestors before gratifying his desire to visit Paris. The regent, far from making any difficulty about receiving him, made the most sumptuous preparations for the Northern reformer, and invited him to be his guest at the Palais Royal. But the hardy Muscovite could not conceal his contempt for the epicurean habits of his host, and horrified him by declaring that he never slept on anything softer than a camp-stretcher, which he carried with him in all his peregrinations, and used on the field of battle and in his own palace, and which he insisted now on substituting for the luxurious couch prepared for him. Altogether, the ways of Peter bewildered the nephew of Louis XIV. He was up with the birds, and flying over the city to see things and people that the latter would never have dreamed of calling his attention to. He expressed a wish to see Mme. de Maintenon, then living in dignified. retreat at St. Cyr. Her Solidity, as Louis XIV. had dubbed her, pleaded ill-health as an excuse for declining the honor and fatigue of an official reception. Peter, therefore, set

off one morning and scared the learned and sedate ladies of St. Cyr out of their propriety by requesting to be shown at once to Mme. de Maintenon's room. On arriving there, he entered without knocking, walked straight to the bed, pushed aside the curtains, and, sitting down beside the astonished lady, entered brusquely into conversation. The Sorbonne he also honored with one of these unceremonious visitations; perceiving a statue of Richelieu in one of the galleries, he rushed up to it, and, clasping the marble in his arms, exclaimed: "O incomparable man! would that thou wert still alive, and I would give thee one-half of my empire to teach me how to govern the other!"

But with all this rough and somewhat ostentatious disregard of etiquette, Peter had a keen sense of what was due to his imperial mightiness, and, with the caprice of a despot, could assert it trenchantly enough when he thought fit. The regent invited a number of the most illustrious men of the day to meet his eccentric guest at a banquet at the Palais Royal. As they were about to enter the dining-room, little Louis XV. stood back to let the czar pass first; Peter was unwilling to take precedence of the King of France, and equally reluctant to walk behind a child, so he wittily solved the difficulty by catching up the small monarch in his arms and carrying him to his seat.

The regent closed his ignoble life at the Palais Royal in 1723. His son Louis, Duke of Orleans, succeeded him. This prince brought his young bride, Jeanne de Bade, there soon after he took possession of his ancestral home, and lost her after a brief and blissful union. At the time of her death, Louis XV. was lying mortally sick, it was believed,

at Metz, and thither, in the frenzy of his grief, the bereaved husband fiew, and, going straight to the room of the dying king, demanded admittance; the attendants expostulated, but Louis pushed them aside, and kicked in the door to announce his loss to the kinsman who himself lay battling with death. He survived Jeanne some years, but never recovered her loss; he led a solitary and desolate life, and gave himself up to works of benevolence and the study of oriental languages. He became a perfect adept in the Arabic, Hebrew, and Greek tongues, and never appeared at court as a widower except when the imperious etiquette of Versailles occasionally demanded it. He died in 1752. His son's reign at the Palais Royal is chiefly remarkable by his having inoculated his own children with small-pox; the daring experiment, which was performed by Tronchin, summoned from Geneva for the purpose, was crowned with success. Paris, transported with joy, made bonfires in the Place in front of the palace, and for a time the rash and fortunate father was the hero of toast and song. Another event which signalized his occupation of Richelieu's palace was the destruction of the theatre by fire (1763). The duke rebuilt it on a somewhat larger but infinitely less gorgeous scale as to decoration. He was an enlightened patron of art, and especially kind in assisting young men whose talent was struggling to make head against poverty. He divined the genius of the young poet Le Fèvre, and encouraged him both by personal notice and by liberal gifts. He was so pleased with Le Fèvre's tragedy Zuma that immediately on its appearance he bestowed a pension of 1,200 crowns on the poet out of his privy purse; and on the latter's asking what services were ex