n."

CHAPTER XIV

A FAIR _INTRIGANTE_

The face of a baby, the heart of a courtesan, and the brain of a
diplomatist. Such was Louise de Querouaille who, two centuries and a
half ago, came to England to barter her charms for a King's dishonour,
and, incidentally, to found a ducal house as a memorial to her
allurements and her shame.

If she had been taken at her own estimate Louise was at least the equal
in lineage of any of the proud beauties whose claim she thus challenged
to Charles II.'s favour. She had behind her, she said, centuries of
noble ancestors, among the greatest in France; and she was kin, near or
remote, to every great name in the land of her birth. All, however, that
is known of this Queen of _intrigantes_ is that she had for father a
worthy, unassuming Breton merchant, who had made a sufficient fortune in
the wool-trade to take his ease, as a country gentleman, for the latter
part of his days, and whose only ambition was to bring up his son and
two daughters respectably, and to dispense a modest hospitality among
his neighbours. It was at Brest that Evelyn enjoyed this hospitality
for a brief period; and the diarist has nothing but what is good to say
of the retired tradesman.

But the worthy merchant had his hands full with one at least of his two
daughters, who was developing dangerous fascinations, and with them a
precocious knowledge of how to turn them to account. He was thankful to
pack Louise off to a boarding-school, where she seems to have led her
teachers such a dance that it became necessary to place her in stronger
hands; and with this view the foolish father sent her to Paris, the last
place in the world for such a charming and designing minx, and to the
custody of a weak-willed aunt.

Nothing could have suited Louise better than this change of arena for
the exercise of her wilfulness and witchery. Before she had been many
days in the French capital she was able to twist her aunt round her
little finger--indeed her power of captivating was, to the end of her
life, her chief dower--and to obtain all the freedom she wanted. And it
was not long before her allurements won the admiration of the dissolute
Duc de Beaufort, High Admiral of France, a man skilled in all the arts
of love. The girl's bourgeois head was completely turned by the
splendour of her first captive; and, to make him secure, she counted no
sacrifice too great. Not, indeed, that she ever regarded her virtue as
an