rich and numerous nobility; the
climate and the city were beautiful; the place was in some sort a centre
and halting-point between Madrid, Paris, and Rome, with which places she
was always in communication, and always hungered after all that passed
there. Genoa determined on, she went there. She was well received,
hoped to fix her tabernacle there, and indeed stayed some years. But at
last ennui seized her; perhaps vexation at not being made enough of. She
could not exist without meddling, and what is there for a superannuated
woman to meddle with at Genoa? She turned her thoughts, therefore,
towards Rome. Then, on sounding, found her course clear, quitted Genoa,
and returned to her nest.

She was not long there before she attached herself to the King and Queen
of England (the Pretender and his wife), and soon governed them openly.
What a poor resource! But it was courtly and had a flavour of occupation
for a woman who could not exist without movement. She finished her life
there remarkably healthy in mind and body, and in a prodigious opulence,
which was not without its use in that deplorable Court. For the rest,
Madame des Ursins was in mediocre estimation at Rome, was deserted by the
Spanish, little visited by the French, but always faithfully paid by
France and Spain, and unmolested by the Regent. She was always occupied
with the world, and with what she had been, but was no longer; yet
without meanness, nay, with courage and dignity.

The loss she experienced in January, 1720, of the Cardinal de la
Tremoille, although there was no real friendship between them, did not
fail, to create a void in her. She survived him three years, preserved
all her health, her strength, her mind until death, and was carried off,
more than eighty years of age, at Rome, on the 5th of December, 1722,
after a very short illness.

She had the pleasure of seeing Madame de Maintenon forgotten and
annihilated in Saint-Cyr, of surviving her, of seeing at Rome her two
enemies, Giudice and Alberoni, as profoundly disgraced as she,--one
falling from the same height, and of relishing the forgetfulness, not to
say contempt, into which they both sank. Her death, which, a few years
before, would have resounded throughout all Europe, made not the least
sensation. The little English Court regretted her, and some private
friends also, of whom I was one. I did not hide this, although,--on
account of M. le Duc d'Orleans, I had kept up no i