carried his
treachery so far as to attribute to me the misfortunes of Olympe, saying,
and publishing all over Paris, that I had incited accusers in order to be
able to deprive her forcibly of her superintendence. This post, which
had been sold to me for four hundred thousand francs, had been paid for
long since; that did not prevent Eugene from everywhere affirming the
contrary.

Since the flight or exile of his lady mother, he had taken it into his
head to dream of the episcopate, and to solicit Pere de la Chaise on the
subject. But the King, who does not like frivolous or absurd figures in
high offices, decided that a little man with a deformity would repel
rather than attract deference at a pinnacle of dignity of the priesthood.

Refused for the episcopate, M. de Soissons thought he might offer himself
as a colonel. His Majesty, who did not know the military ways of this
abbe, refused him anew, both as an abbe and as a hunchback, and as a
public libertine already degraded by his irregularities.

From all these refusals and mortifications there sprung his firm resolve
to quit France. He had been born there; he left all his family there
except his mother; he declared himself its undying enemy, and said
publicly in Germany that Louis XIV. would shed tears of blood for the
injury and the affront which he had offered him.

MM. de Conti, after the events in Hungary and at Vienna, returned to
France covered with laurels. They came to salute the King at Versailles.
His Majesty gave them neither a good nor a bad reception. The Princes
left the same day for Chantilly, where M. de Conde, their paternal
uncle, tried to curb their too romantic imaginations and guaranteed their
good behaviour in the future.

This life, sedentary or spent in hunting, began to weary them, when
overruling Providence was pleased to send them a diversion of the highest
importance. M. le Prince de Conti was seized suddenly with that burning
fever which announces the smallpox. Every imaginable care was useless;
he died of it and bequeathed, in spite of himself, a most premature and
afflicting widowhood to his young and charming spouse, who was not, till
long afterwards, let into the secret of his scandalous excesses.

M. de la Roche-sur-Yon, his only brother, was as distressed at his death
as though he had nothing to gain by it; he took immediately the name of
Conti, and doffed the other, which he had hitherto borne as a borrowed
title. T