e, the
son of Pedro the Cruel, and from Juana de Castro, his mistress. Proud of
his young wife's beauty, the Marquis de Castellane, who was an officer
of the king's galleys, had hastened to present her at court. Louis XIV,
who at the time of her presentation was barely twenty years old, was
struck by her enchanting face, and to the great despair of the famous
beauties of the day danced with her three times in one evening. Finally,
as a crowning touch to her reputation, the famous Christina of Sweden,
who was then at the French court, said of her that she had never, in
any of the kingdoms through which she had passed, seen anything equal to
"the beautiful Provencale." This praise had been so well received,
that the name of "the beautiful Provencale" had clung to Madame de
Castellane, and she was everywhere known by it.

This favour of Louis XIV and this summing up of Christina's had been
enough to bring the Marquise de Castellane instantly into fashion;
and Mignard, who had just received a patent of nobility and been made
painter to the king, put the seal to her celebrity by asking leave to
paint her portrait. That portrait still exists, and gives a perfect
notion of the beauty which it represents; but as the portrait is far
from our readers' eyes, we will content ourselves by repeating, in its
own original words, the one given in 1667 by the author of a pamphlet
published at Rouen under the following title: True and Principal
Circumstances of the Deplorable Death of Madame the Marquise de Ganges:

[Note: It is from this pamphlet, and from the Account of the Death of
Madame the Marquise de Ganges, formerly Marquise de Castellane, that we
have borrowed the principal circumstances of this tragic story. To
these documents we must add--that we may not be constantly referring our
readers to original sources--the Celebrated Trials by Guyot de Pitaval,
the Life of Marie de Rossan, and the Lettres galantes of Madame
Desnoyers.]

"Her complexion, which was of a dazzling whiteness, was illumined by
not too brilliant a red, and art itself could not have arranged more
skilfully the gradations by which this red joined and merged into the
whiteness of the complexion. The brilliance of her face was heightened
by the decided blackness of her hair, growing, as though drawn by a
painter of the finest taste, around a well proportioned brow; her large,
well opened eyes were of the same hue as her hair, and shone with a
soft and piercing