beauty to complete her conquest of the amorous Sovereign--"the last
conquest of her conquering eyes," as Waller wrote in his fulsome
greeting of the new divinity of the Whitehall seraglio.

For once Louise's indomitable courage showed signs of yielding. The
whole armoury of fate seemed arrayed against her at this crisis in her
life; even Louis, for whom she had striven so hard, began to distrust
her powers and to show indifference to her. When Forneron paid her a
visit at this time he found her in tears. "She opened her heart to him,
in the presence of her two French maids, who stood by with downcast
eyes. Tears rained down her cheeks; and her speech was broken with sobs
and sighs." Never had this designing beauty been so near the verge of
absolute ruin.

It is not necessary perhaps to follow the Duchess through the period of
her eclipse; to watch the weak-kneed Charles sink deeper and deeper into
the morass of his disloyalty until, in return for a subsidy of
£4,000,000, he offered to dissolve parliament and to make England the
bond-slave of Louis's designs on Europe; or to see Louise, the chief
instrument of all this ignominy, reach the climax of her disgrace and
her peril when mobs besieged Whitehall, and clamoured that the "Jezebel"
should be sent to the scaffold.

It is sufficient for our purpose to know that through all this terrible
time she steered her way with almost superhuman skill back to the
sunshine of success and favour. Her life-long ambition was crowned when
Louis gave her the d'Aubigny lands and, with them, the _tabouret_ which
had so long dazzled her eyes and eluded her grasp. When the sky in
England had at last cleared she paid a visit to her native land. For
four ecstatic months the wool merchant's daughter made a triumphant