llowed himself to be beaten, and in his turn
soundly beat Mademoiselle; and this happened several times, until at
last, tired of each other, they quarrelled once for all and never saw
each other again; he kept several portraits of her, however, in his house
or upon him, and never spoke of her without much respect. Nobody doubted
they had been secretly married. At her death he assumed a livery almost
black, with silver lace; this he changed into white with a little blue
upon gold, when silver was prohibited upon liveries.

His temper, naturally scornful and capricious, rendered more so by prison
and solitude, had made him a recluse and dreamer; so that having in his
house the best of company, he left them to Madame de Lauzun, and withdrew
alone all the afternoon, several hours running, almost always without
books, for he read only a few works of fancy--a very few--and without
sequence; so that he knew nothing except what he had seen, and until the
last was exclusively occupied with the Court and the news of the great
world. I have a thousand times regretted his radical incapacity to write
down what he had seen and done. It would have been a treasure of the
most curious anecdotes, but he had no perseverance, no application. I
have often tried to draw from him some morsels. Another misfortune. He
began to relate; in the recital names occurred of people who had taken
part in what he wished to relate. He instantly quitted the principal
object of the story in order to hang on to one of these persons, and
immediately after to some other person connected with the first, then to
a third, in the manner of the romances; he threaded through a dozen
histories at once, which made him lose ground and drove him from one to
the other without ever finishing anything; and with this his words were
very confused, so that it was impossible to learn anything from him or
retain anything he said. For the rest, his conversation was always
constrained by caprice or policy; and was amusing only by starts, and by
the malicious witticisms which sprung out of it. A few months after his
last illness, that is to say, when he was more than ninety years of age,
he broke in his horses and made a hundred passades at the Bois de
Boulogne (before the King, who was going to the Muette), upon a colt he
had just trained, surprising the spectators by his address, his firmness,
and his grace. These details about him might go on for ever.

His last illness came on