s
unblemished character. He was now in search of some place about the
court, and soon found favor in the eyes of the citizen-king, to whom
the quiet virtues of the Tiers-Etat were of more value than the flash
and tinsel of the Regence. The count was of fine, commanding person
and handsome countenance: moreover, he was "the man with a story," and
a painful one it was, creative of the greatest interest in the tender
bosoms of the Orleans princesses. Although poor, belonging to a ruined
family, his prospects had been good at the court of Charles Dix, and
one of the greatest ladies of the court had cast her eyes upon him as
a suitable _parti_ for her daughter. The young lady, nothing loath,
had accepted with alacrity the proposition of marriage, seconded as
it was by the Duchesse d'Angouleme, and backed by the promise of high
office on its realization. A marriage is easy to arrange in France;
not so the execution of the marriage-contract, which is rendered as
wearisome by delays as the still more dilatory proceedings of the law;
and therefore it was deemed advisable, in order to pass this dismal
period, to despatch the Count de Cambis to Holland for the purchase of
horses for the royal stable. Arrived at The Hague, he was seized with
an attack of smallpox, which laid him prostrate on the low flock bed
of the miserable little inn to which he had been conveyed on landing
from the boat. Here he lay for some time incognito, his identity
unknown to any save the faithful valet who attended him, until he had
perfectly recovered from the disease, which, however, was found to
have left the most frightful traces of its passage in scar and seam
and furrow from forehead to chin. The handsome young cavalier who
landed so full of hope and spirits on the quay at The Hague rose from
his bed with a face bloated and discolored, seamed and scarred
and pockmarked, his once luxuriant locks grown thin and dank, his
eyelashes gone, his whole appearance so changed that as he gazed at
himself for the first time in the looking-glass he was overwhelmed
with such despair that, as he owned afterward to his friends, he would
have thrown himself from the window at which he stood into the canal
below had he not been prevented by the strong arm of his servant,
Dulac. A terrible period of anguish and depression followed on this
first excitement, but he awoke from it and returned to life once more,
a sadder and a wiser man. When the first impression of horror