astonishing and fatal; the general mismanagement of the Court is so
crazy, that, had we lived in Paris at the moment, perhaps we could
hardly have believed the Queen to be innocent. Even persons greatly
prejudiced in her favour might well have been deceived, and the people
'loveth to think the worst, and is hardly to be moved from that
opinion,' as was said of the Scottish public at the date of the Gowrie
conspiracy.

An infidelity of Henri II. of France to his wedded wife, Catherine de
Médicis, and the misplaced affection of Louis XV. for Madame du Barry,
were the remote but real causes that helped to ruin the House of
France. Without the amour of Henri II., there would have been no
Jeanne de Valois; without the hope that Louis XV. would stick at
nothing to please Madame du Barry, the diamond necklace would never
have been woven.

Henri II. loved, about 1550, a lady named Nicole de Savigny, and by
her had a son, Henri de Saint-Remy, whom he legitimated. Saint-Remy
was the great, great, great, great-grandfather of Jeanne de Valois,
the flower of minxes. Her father, a ruined man, dwelt in a corner of
the family _château_, a predacious, poaching, athletic, broken scion
of royalty, who drank and brawled with the peasants, and married his
mistress, a servant-girl. Jeanne was born at the _château_ of
Fontette, near Bar-sur-Aube, on April 22, 1756, and she and her
brother and little sister starved in their mouldering tower, kept
alive by the charity of the neighbours and of the _curé_, who begged
clothes for these descendants of kings. But their scutcheon was--and
Jeanne never forgot the fact--argent, three _fleurs de lys_ or, on a
fesse azure. The _noblesse_ of the family was later scrutinised by the
famous d'Hozier and pronounced authentic. Jeanne, with bare feet, and