the drama of the French Court many a fine-feathered villain "struts
his brief hour" on the stage, dazzling eyes by his splendour, and
shocking a world none too easily shocked in those days of easy morals by
his profligacy; but it would be difficult among all these gilded rakes
to find a match for the Duc de Richelieu, who carried his villainies
through little less than a century of life.

Born in 1696, when Louis XIV. had still nearly twenty years of his long
reign before him, Louis Francois Armand Duplessis, Duc de Richelieu,
survived to hear the rumblings which heralded the French Revolution
ninety-two years later; and for three-quarters of a century to be known
as the most accomplished and heartless roue in all France. Bearer of a
great name, and inheritor of the splendours and riches of his
great-uncle, the Cardinal, who was Louis XII.'s right-hand man, and, in
his day, the most powerful subject in Europe, the Duc was born with the
football of fortune at his feet; and probably no man who has ever lived
so shamefully prostituted such magnificent opportunities and gifts.

As a boy, still in his teens, he had begun to play the role of Don Juan
at the Court of the child-King, Louis XV. The most beautiful women at
the Court, we are told, went crazy over the handsome boy, who bore the
most splendid name in France; and thus early his head was turned by
flatteries and attentions which followed him almost to the grave.

The young Duchesse de Bourgogne, the King's mother, made love to him, to
the scandal of the Court; and from Princesses of the Blood Royal to the
humblest serving-maid, there was scarcely a woman at Court who would not
have given her eyes for a smile from the Duc de Fronsac, as he was then
known.

How he revelled in his conquests he makes abundantly clear in the
Memoirs he left behind him--surely the most scandalous ever written--in
which he recounts his love affairs, in long sequence, with a
cold-blooded heartlessness which shocks the reader to-day, so long after
lover and victims have been dust. He revels in describing the artifices
by which he got the most unassailable of women into his power--such as
the young and beautiful Madame Michelin, whose religious scruples proved
such a frail barrier against the assaults of the young Lothario. He
chuckles with a diabolical pride as he tells us how he played off one
mistress against another; how he made one liaison pave the way to its
successor; and how he aband