ain at his secret Penelope's task of undoing by
night the warp and woof which his ministers wove by day. In these
mysterious labours of his the Comte de Broglie, later a firm friend of
d'Eon, was, with Tercier, one of his main assistants.

The King thus enjoyed all the pleasures and excitements of a
conspirator in his own kingdom, dealing in ciphered despatches, with
the usual cant names, carried in the false bottoms of snuff-boxes,
precisely as if he had been a Jacobite plotter. It was entertaining,
but it was not diplomacy, and, sooner or later, Louis was certain to
be 'blackmailed' by some underling in his service. That underling was
to be d'Eon.

In 1755 Louis wished to renew relations, long interrupted, with
Elizabeth, Empress of Russia, the lady whom Prince Charlie wanted to
marry, and from whose offered hand the brave James Keith fled as fast
as horses could carry him. Elizabeth, in 1755, was an ally of England,
but was known to be French in her personal sympathies, though she was
difficult of access. As a messenger, Louis chose a Scot, described by
Captain Buchan Telfer as a Mackenzie, a Jesuit, calling himself the
Chevalier Douglas, and a Jacobite exile. He is not to be found in the
_Dictionary of National Biography_. A Sir James and a Sir John
Douglas--if both were not the same man--were employed as political
agents between the English and Scottish Jacobites in 1746, and, in
1749, between the Prince and the Landgrave of Hesse. Whatever the true
name of the Douglas of Louis XV., I suspect that he was one or the
other of these dim Jacobites of the Douglas clan. In June 1755 this
Chevalier Douglas was sent by Louis to deal with Elizabeth. He was
certainly understood by Louis to be a real Douglas, a fugitive
Jacobite, and he was to use in ciphered despatches precisely the same
silly sort of veiled language about the fur trade as Prince Charles's
envoys had just been using about 'the timber trade' with Sweden.

Douglas set forth, disguised as an intellectual British tourist, in
the summer of 1755, and it is Captain Buchan Telfer's view that d'Eon
joined him, also as a political agent, in female apparel, on the road,
and that, while Douglas failed and left Russia by October 1755, d'Eon
remained at St. Petersburg, attired as a girl, Douglas's niece, and
acting as the _lectrice_ of the Empress, whom he converted to the
French alliance! This is the traditional theory, but is almost
certainly erroneous. Sometimes, in