been secretly employed by the friends of the Chevalier. This
circumstance occasioned me much internal emotion, though there could be
no doubt that the Barnard whom I had such cause to execrate had only
borrowed from this minion the disguise of his name.

The Regent received me with all the graciousness and complaisance for
which he was so remarkable. To say the truth, my mission had been
extremely fortunate in its results; the only cause in which the Regent
was concerned the interests of which Peter the Great appeared to
disregard was that of the Chevalier; but I had been fully instructed on
that head anterior to my legation.

There appears very often to be a sort of moral fitness between the
beginning and the end of certain alliances or acquaintances. This
sentiment is not very clearly expressed. I am about to illustrate it by
an important event in my political life. During my absence Dubois had
made rapid steps towards being a great man. He was daily growing into
power, and those courtiers who were neither too haughty nor too honest
to bend the knee to so vicious yet able a minion had already singled him
out as a fit person to flatter and to rise by. For me, I neither sought
nor avoided him: but he was as civil towards me as his /brusque/ temper
permitted him to be towards most persons; and as our careers were not
likely to cross one another, I thought I might reckon on his neutrality,
if not on his friendship. Chance turned the scale against me.

One day I received an anonymous letter, requesting me to be, at such an
hour, at a certain house in the Rue ------. It occurred to me as no
improbable supposition that the appointment might relate to my
individual circumstances, whether domestic or political, and I certainly
had not at the moment any ideas of gallantry in my brain. At the hour