l sorts of tawdry rubbish more than two
feet high, making women's faces seem in the middle of their bodies. The
old ladies wore the same, but made of black gauze. If they moved ever so
lightly the edifice trembled and the inconvenience was extreme. The King
could not endure them, but master as he was of everything was unable to
banish them. They lasted for ten years and more, despite all he could
say and do. What this monarch had been unable to perform, the taste and
example of a silly foreigner accomplished with the most surprising
rapidity. From extreme height, the ladies descended to extreme lowness,
and these head-dresses, more simple; more convenient, and more becoming,
last even now. Reasonable people wait with impatience for some other mad
stranger who will strip our dames of these immense baskets, thoroughly
insupportable to themselves and to others.

Shortly after the Duke of Shrewsbury arrived in Paris, the Hotel de Powis
in London, occupied by our ambassador the Duc d'Aumont, was burnt to the
ground. A neighbouring house was pulled down to prevent others catching
fire. The plate of M. d'Aumont was saved. He pretended to have lost
everything else. He pretended also to have received several warnings
that his house was to be burnt and himself assassinated, and that the
Queen, to whom he had mentioned these warnings, offered to give him a
guard. People judged otherwise in London and Paris, and felt persuaded
he himself had been the incendiary in order to draw money from the King
and also to conceal some monstrous smuggling operations, by which he
gained enormously, and which the English had complained of ever since his
arrival. This is at least what was publicly said in the two courts and
cities, and nearly everybody believed it.

But to return to the peace. The renunciations were ready, towards the
middle of March, and were agreed upon. The King was invited to sign them
by his own most pressing interest; and the Court of England, to which we
owed all, was not less interested in consummating this grand work, so as
to enjoy, with the glory of having imposed it upon all the powers, that
domestic repose which was unceasingly disturbed by the party opposed to
the government, which party, excited by the enemies of peace abroad,
could not cease to cause disquiet to the Queen's minister, while, by
delay in signing, vain hopes of disturbing the peace or hindering its
ratification existed in people's minds.