[This lively repartee of the Duchesse de Polignac is a droll imitation of
a line in the "Mercure Galant." In the quarrel scene one of the lawyers
says to his brother quill: 'Ton pere etait aveugle et jouait du
hautbois.']

The Queen found this sort of humour very much to her taste, and said that
no pedant should ever be her friend.

Before the Queen fixed her assemblies at Madame de Polignac's, she
occasionally passed the evening at the house of the Duc and Duchesse de
Duras, where a brilliant party of young persons met together. They
introduced a taste for trifling games, such as question and answer,
'guerre panpan', blind man's buff, and especially a game called
'descampativos'. The people of Paris, always criticising, but always
imitating the customs of the Court, were infected with the mania for these
childish sports. Madame de Genlis, sketching the follies of the day in
one of her plays, speaks of these famous 'descampativos'; and also of the
rage for making a friend, called the 'inseparable', until a whim or the
slightest difference might occasion a total rupture.




CHAPTER VIII.


The Duc de Choiseul had reappeared at Court on the ceremony of the King's
coronation for the first time after his disgrace under Louis XV. in 1770.
The state of public feeling on the subject gave his friends hope of seeing