you a refractory President 'at Croe in Combrailles on the top of steep
rocks, inaccessible except by litters,' there to consider himself.
Likewise there rose Abbe Terray, dissolute Financier, paying eightpence
in the shilling,--so that wits exclaim in some press at the playhouse,
"Where is Abbe Terray, that he might reduce us to two-thirds!" And so
have these individuals (verily by black-art) built them a Domdaniel,
or enchanted Dubarrydom; call it an Armida-Palace, where they dwell
pleasantly; Chancellor Maupeou 'playing blind-man's-buff' with
the scarlet Enchantress; or gallantly presenting her with dwarf
Negroes;--and a Most Christian King has unspeakable peace within doors,
whatever he may have without. "My Chancellor is a scoundrel; but I
cannot do without him." (Dulaure, Histoire de Paris (Paris, 1824), vii.
328.)

Beautiful Armida-Palace, where the inmates live enchanted lives;
lapped in soft music of adulation; waited on by the splendours of the
world;--which nevertheless hangs wondrously as by a single hair. Should
the Most Christian King die; or even get seriously afraid of dying! For,
alas, had not the fair haughty Chateauroux to fly, with wet cheeks
and flaming heart, from that Fever-scene at Metz; driven forth by sour
shavelings? She hardly returned, when fever and shavelings were both
swept into the background. Pompadour too, when Damiens wounded Royalty
'slightly, under the fifth rib,' and our drive to Trianon went off
futile, in shrieks and madly shaken torches,--had to pack, and be in
readiness: yet did not go, the wound not proving poisoned. For his
Majesty has religious faith; believes, at least in a Devil. And now
a third peril; and who knows what may be in it! For the Doctors look
grave; ask privily, If his Majesty had not the small-pox long ago?--and
doubt it may have been a false kind. Yes, Maupeou, pucker those sinister
brows of thine, and peer out on it with thy malign rat-eyes: it is a