Note 103 — Chapter V

The Comte de Guines had been for some years Ambassador at Berlin—a post he procured through the intervention of Madame Montesson, preparatory to her marriage to the Duc d’Orleans. He belonged to the school of Choiseul, Richelieu, Soubize, and Lauzun. His embassy to London involved him in a very unpleasant suit with his secretary, La Forte, who, having lost large sums in stock-jobbing speculations during the excitement caused by the expected war with Spain on account of the Falkland Islands, declared himself bankrupt, and endeavoured to prove that he had been the agent of M. de Guines in these speculations. The action was eventually decided in the Ambassador’s favour, but only after long litigation, in the course of which it was difficult to avert strong suspicions of the truth of the charge.—(Flassan’s Diplomatie Française, vol. v. p. 54.)—M. de Guines emigrated during the Revolution, and died in 1806, aged seventy-one.—(See more of him in Thiebault’s Frederic the Second, and the Mémoires de Madame de Genlis, vol. i. p. 252, seqq. and vol. ii. p. 40.)—E.