e Duchy domains. Even this most coveted of all
the gifts in his power Louis promised to the little adventuress if she
would but carry out, not only all she had undertaken, but any future
commands he might lay upon her.

His immediate object now was to take advantage of the distraction caused
by the war between England and Holland to annex the Palatinate and the
Franche Comte, on which he had long set covetous eyes; but he quickly
discovered that for once his vaulting ambition had overleaped itself.
The whole of Europe took alarm; England to a man rose in angry protest,
sworn enemies joining hands to resist such an outrageous aggression; and
Charles, in a frenzy of fear for his crown, dismissed his hireling army
paid with Louis's gold. The proud edifice which the Duchess of
Portsmouth had so carefully reared was threatened with a cataclysm of
popular rage against the "painted French spy" who was regarded, and
perhaps rightly, as a prime instigator of the mischief, and the worst
enemy of the country that had given her such generous hospitality.

To add to the danger of her position she became seriously ill; sustained
heavy money losses; and even her supremacy with the King was gravely
imperilled by the arrival at Court of Mazarin's loveliest niece,
Hortense de Mancini, with whom Charles had flirted in the days of his
exile, and who now came to England in the full bloom of her peerless
beauty to complete her conquest of the amorous Sovereign--"the last
conquest of her conquering eyes," as Waller wrote in his fulsome
greeting of the new divinity of the Whitehall seraglio.

For once Louise's indomitable courage showed signs of yielding. The
whole armoury of fate seemed arrayed against her at this crisis in her
life; even Louis, for whom she had striven so hard, began to distrust
her powers and to show indifference to her. When Forneron paid her a
visit at this time he found her in tears. "She opened her heart to him,
in the presence of her two French maids, who stood by with downcast
eyes. Tears rained down her cheeks; and her speech was broken with sobs
and sighs." Never had this designing beauty been so near the verge of
absolute ruin.

It is not necessary perhaps to follow the Duchess through the period of
her eclipse; to watch the weak-kneed Charles sink deeper and deeper into
the morass of his disloyalty until, in return for a subsidy of
L4,000,000, he offered to dissolve parliament and to make England the
bond-slav