Such was the devotion which this heartless profligate won from some of the most beautiful and highly placed ladies of France.  What was the secret of the spell he cast over them it is difficult to say.  It is true that he was a handsome man, as his portraits show, but there were men quite as handsome at the French Court; he was courtly and accomplished, but he had many rivals as clever and as skilled in courtly arts as himself.  His power must, one thinks, have lain in that strange magnetism which women seem so powerless to resist in men, and which outweighs all graces of mind and physical perfections.

The Duc’s career, however, was not one unbroken dallying with love.  Thrice, at least, he was sent to cool his ardour within the walls of the Bastille—­on one occasion as the result of a duel with the Comte de Gace.  His lady-loves were desolate at the cruel fate which had overtaken their idol.  They fell on their knees at the Regent’s feet, and, with tears streaming down their pretty cheeks, pleaded for his freedom.  Two of the Royal Princesses, both disguised as Sisters of Charity, visited the prisoner daily in his dungeon, carrying with them delicacies to tempt his appetite, and consolation to cheer his captivity.

In vain did Duc and Comte both declare that they had never fought a duel; and when, in the absence of proof, the Regent insisted that their bodies should be examined for the convicting wounds, the impish Richelieu came triumphantly through the ordeal as the result of having his wounds covered with pink taffeta and skilfully painted!

It was a more serious matter that sent him again to the Bastille in 1718.  False to his country as to the victims of his fascinations, he had been plotting with Spain, France’s bitterest enemy, for the seizure of the Regent and the carrying him off across the Pyrenees; and certain incriminating letters sent to him by Cardinal Alberoni had been intercepted, and were in the Regent’s hands.  The Regent’s daughter, Mademoiselle de Valois, warned her lover of his danger, but too late.  Before he could escape, he was arrested, and with an escort of archers was safely lodged in the Bastille.

Our Lothario was now indeed in a parlous plight.  Lodged in the deepest and most loathsome dungeon of the Bastille—­a dungeon so damp that within a few hours his clothes were saturated—­without even a chair to sit on or a bed to lie on, with legions of hungry rats for company, he was now face to face with almost certain death.  The Regent, whose love affairs he had thwarted a score of times, and who thus had no reason to love the profligate Duc, vowed that his head should pay the price of his treason.

Once more the Court ladies were reduced to hysterics and despair, and forgot their jealousies in a common appeal to the Regent for clemency.  Mademoiselle de Valois was driven to distraction; and when tears and pleadings failed to soften her father’s heart, she declared in the hearing of the Court that she would commit suicide unless her lover was restored to liberty.  In company with her rival, Mademoiselle de Charolais, she visited the dungeon in the dark night hours, taking flint and steel, candles and bonbons, to weep with the captive.