I. 1764. A SCION OF ROYALTY IN TATTERS.—“TAKE PITY ON THE ORPHAN DESCENDANTS OF HENRY II., KING OF FRANCE.”

Rather more than a century ago, in the year 1764, just as death had closed the career of the once all-powerful Madame de Pompadour, who had long since exhausted all her arts in vain endeavours to revive the jaded passions of her royal lover, and when the star of the notorious Dubarry was gaining the ascendant, the Marquis and Marchioness de Boulainvilliers, attended by servants and outriders in the gayest of liveries, were driving one day in a carriage and four from their hôtel at Paris to the château of Passy, of which pleasant river-side village the marquis was seigneur. All at once their attention was attracted to a little girl about eight years of age, clad in the beggar’s accustomed livery—rags and tatters, who, carrying a younger sister on her back, ran beside the carriage, at that moment proceeding up the hill at a slow pace, and appealed for charity after the following strange fashion:—“Kind lady and gentleman, pray take pity on two poor orphans descended from Henry the Second of Valois, King of France.”

The marchioness, struck by the singularity of this appeal, stopped the carriage and commenced questioning the child, much to the annoyance of her parsimonious husband, who petulantly remarked she ought to know well enough that it was a common trick of poverty to forge lies to excite compassion. The marchioness, however, persisted in her inquiries, and ascertained from the child whereabouts she lived, then, after promising to see into the truth of her statement and telling a servant to give her a few pieces of silver, the lady, greatly to the satisfaction of her impatient husband, gave directions for the carriage to proceed.

The next day, in accordance with her promise, the marchioness despatched a trusty servant to the place where the children lodged, at the adjacent village of Chaillot, facing the river between Passy and the then fashionable Cours la Reine, where the commonality—in other words, those who wore “frieze, woollen stockings and cloth hoods”—were forbidden to show themselves. At Chaillot the people of the house, and the neighbours generally, confirmed, so far as they were able, the truth of the little beggar girl’s story, which, as this partakes largely of the romantic, and exercised moreover an important influence on our heroine’s subsequent remarkable career, we propose recounting here in all the necessary detail.