aglio." The prince did not judge it expedient to
discuss the subject, but he related the incident to the lieutenant of
police, and the next day these promenaders were more rigorously expelled
than ever. In consequence, "to-day," relates a chronicler of the period,
"excepting on days of the opera, the Palais-Royal is nothing but a vast
solitude." In 1784, the streets back of it, inhabited by a dissolute and
degraded population of both sexes, had become "veritable cloacae." On the
evening of the 31st of October, 1785, at a moment when the evening
promenade was more crowded even than usual, a dragoon, having one of
these _filles_ on his arm, pushed by the throng, happened to step on the
foot of the Abbe de Lubersac, walking near him; the latter made use of a
strong expression, to which the soldier replied in kind; the young woman
endeavored to make peace by saying: "After all, it is only an abbe, who
is not worth stopping for." The churchman, still further forgetting
himself, permitted himself to kick the young woman quite as if she were
a man; the dragoon took him by the collar; the _Suisses_ of the palace
hastened to quell the riot, but their numbers were quite insufficient;
the Duc de Chartres, seeing the tumult, but not daring to show himself
because of his great unpopularity, summoned the city guard to what by
this time had become a "regular field of battle," and the disturbance
was finally quelled. Among the wounded who were carried off was a
Chevalier de Saint-Louis, "disemboweled;" and thereafter the Suisses
prohibited the entrance of the gardens to all women of doubtful virtue.

It may be remembered that, in the celebrated affair of the diamond
necklace, the young person who was persuaded by the adventuress, Madame
de la Motte, to personify the queen, Marie Antoinette, and to meet the
duped Cardinal Rohan in the park of Versailles at ten o'clock in the
evening for the purpose of giving him the fictitious authority to
purchase the necklace, was a _fille du monde_ who lived in the Rue du
Jour at Paris, and was known as "la d'Oliva." For playing this part, the
young woman was promised fifteen thousand livres. The _memoire_ that was
afterward drawn up by the avocat of Madame de la Motte "excited the
interest of all sensitive souls by relating that the demoiselle,
enceinte at the moment of her arrest, had been delivered in the Bastile,
and was nursing her infant herself."

[Illustration: PILLAGE OF THE ARCHBISHOP'S DWE