o
eyes of the Signor Mazarin were the stars more or less brilliant in
which the France of the seventeenth century read its destiny every
evening and every morning.

Monseigneur neither won nor lost; he was, therefore, neither gay nor
sad. It was a stagnation in which, full of pity for him, Anne of Austria
would not have willingly left him; but in order to attract the attention
of the sick man by some brilliant stroke, she must have either won
or lost. To win would have been dangerous, because Mazarin would have
changed his indifference into an ugly grimace; to lose would likewise
have been dangerous, because she must have cheated, and the infanta,
who watched her game, would, doubtless, have exclaimed against her
partiality for Mazarin. Profiting by this calm, the courtiers were
chatting. When not in a bad humor, M. de Mazarin was a very _debonnaire_
prince, and he, who prevented nobody from singing, provided they paid,
was not tyrant enough to prevent people from talking, provided they made
up their minds to lose.

They were therefore chatting. At the first table, the king's younger
brother, Philip, Duc d'Anjou, was admiring his handsome face in the
glass of a box. His favorite, the Chevalier de Lorraine, leaning over
the back of the prince's chair, was listening, with secret envy, to
the Comte de Guiche, another of Philip's favorites, who was relating in
choice terms the various vicissitudes of fortune of the royal adventurer
Charles II. He told, as so many fabulous events, all the history of his
perigrinations in Scotland, and his terrors when the enemy's party was
so closely on his track; of nights spent in trees, and days spent
in hunger and combats. By degrees, the fate of the unfortunate king
interested his auditors so greatly, that the play languished even at the
royal table, and the young king, with a pensive look and downcast eye,
followed, without appearing to give any attention to it, the smallest
details of this Odyssey, very picturesquely related by the Comte de
Guiche.

The Comtesse de Soissons interrupted the narrator: "Confess, count, you
are inventing."

"Madame, I am repeating like a parrot all the stories related to me by
different Englishmen. To my shame I am compelled to say, I am as exact
as a copy."

"Charles II. would have died before he could have endured all that."

Louis XIV. raised his intelligent and proud head. "Madame," said he, in
a grave tone, still partaking something of the ti