t on her career of infamy and conquest. She
seems to have conducted an open and shameless intrigue with De
Vendome--a man who, according to St Simon, had never gone sober to bed
for a generation, who was a swindler, liar, and thief, and the most
despicable and dangerous man living. When the Duchess, realising that
her intrigue with this handsome scoundrel was going too far, sought to
withdraw, he threatened to show certain incriminating letters she had
written to him, to the King; and it was only when Louis intervened and,
by bribes and commands, induced her lover to return to France, that she
was able to breathe again.

Not content with setting such a shameless example to the Court, she was
the arch-priestess of the gaming-tables at which Charles and his
courtiers spent their nights to the chink of glasses and gold. She made
light, we learn, of losing 5,000 guineas at a sitting. No wonder Pepys
was shocked at such scenes.

"I was told to-night," he writes, "that my Lady
Castlemaine is so great a gamester as to have won L15,400
in one night, and lost L25,000 in another night at play,
and has played L1000 and L1500 at a cast."

The Duchesse de Mazarin, he tells us,

"won at basset, of Nell Gwynne 1400 guineas in one night,
and of the Duchess of Portsmouth above L8000, in doing
which she exerted her utmost cunning and had the greatest
satisfaction, because they were rivals in the Royal
favour."

But the end of these saturnalia was at hand. The last glimpse we have of
them was on the night of 1st February 1685--the last Sunday Charles was
permitted to spend on earth.

"The great courtiers," says Evelyn, "and other dissolute
persons were playing at basset round a large table, with
a bank of at least L2000 before them. The King, though
not engaged in the game, was to the full as scandalously
occupied, sitting in open dalliance with three of the
shameless women of the Court, the Duchesses of
Portsmouth, Morland, and Mazarin, and others of the same
stamp, while a French boy was singing love-songs in that
glorious gallery. Six days after," he adds, "all was in
the dust."

As the end of that wasted Royal life drew near the Duchess's chief
concern--for it was her last opportunity of redeeming one of her pledges
to Louis, her paymaster--was that Charles should at least die an avowed
Catholic.

"I found her," Barillon wr