young king was growing up, still a stranger to affairs, solely
occupied with the pleasures of the chase, handsome, elegant, with noble
and regular features, a cold and listless expression. In the month of
February, 1725, he fell ill; for two days there was great danger. The
duke thought himself to be threatened with the elevation of the house of
Orleans to the throne. "I'll not be caught so again," he muttered
between his teeth, when he came one night to inquire how the king was,
"if he recovers, I'll have him married." The king did recover, but the
Infanta was only seven years old. Philip V., who had for a short time
abdicated, retiring with the queen to a remote castle in the heart of the
forests, had just remounted the throne after the death of his eldest son,
Louis I. Small-pox had carried off the young monarch, who had reigned
but eight months. Elizabeth Farnese, aided by the pope's nuncio and some
monks who were devoted to her, had triumphed over her husband's religious
scruples and the superstitious counsels of his confessor; she was once
more reigning over Spain, when she heard that the little Infanta-queen,
whose betrothal to the King of France had but lately caused so much joy,
was about to be sent away from the court of her royal spouse. "The
Infanta must be started off, and by coach too, to get it over sooner,"
exclaimed Count Morville, who had been ordered by Madame de Prie to draw
up a list of the marriageable princesses in Europe. Their number
amounted to ninety-nine; twenty-five Catholics, three Anglicans, thirteen
Calvinists, fifty-five Lutherans, and three Greeks. The Infanta had
already started for Madrid; the Regent's two daughters, the young widow
of Louis I. and Mdlle. de Beaujolais, promised to Don Carlos, were on
their way back to France; the advisers of Louis XV. were still looking
out for a wife for him. Spain had been mortally offended, without the
duke's having yet seen his way to forming a new alliance in place of that
which he had just broken off. Some attempts at arrangement with George
I. had failed; an English princess could not abjure Protestantism. Such
scruples did not stop Catherine I., widow of Peter the Great, who had
taken the power into her own hands to the detriment of the czar's
grandson; she offered the duke her second daughter, the grand-duchess
Elizabeth, for King Louis XV., with a promise of abjuration on the part
of the princess, and of a treaty which should sec