to Madame.  She told him to leave the task of communicating it to the King to her, and begged of him to say nothing about the matter.  M. de Marigny, who did not like the Abbe, came to see me in the evening; and I affected to know nothing of the story, and to hear it for the first time from him.  “He must have been out of his senses,” said he, “to shoot under the King’s windows,”—­and enlarged much on the airs he gave himself.  Madame de Pompadour gave this affair the best colouring she could:  the King was, nevertheless, greatly disgusted at it, and twenty times, since the Abbe’s disgrace, when he passed over that part of the park, he said, “This is where the Abbe took his pleasure.”  The King never liked him; and Madame de Pompadour told me one night, after his disgrace, when I was sitting up with her in her illness, that she saw, before he had been Minister a week, that he was not fit for his office.  “If that hypocritical Bishop,” said she, speaking of the Bishop of Mirepoix, “had not prevented the King from granting him a pension of four hundred louis a year, which he had promised me, he would never have been appointed Ambassador.  I should, afterwards, have been able to give him an income of eight hundred louis a year, perhaps the place of master of the chapel.  Thus he would have been happier, and I should have had nothing to regret.”  I took the liberty of saying that I did not agree with her.  That he had yet remaining advantages, of which he could not be deprived; that his exile would terminate; and that he would then be a Cardinal, with an income of eight thousand louis a year.  “That is true,” she replied; “but I think of the mortifications he has undergone, and of the ambition which devours him; and, lastly, I think of myself.  I should have still enjoyed his society, and should have had, in my declining years, an old and amiable friend, if he had not been Minister.”  The King sent him away in anger, and was strongly inclined to refuse him the hat.  M. Quesnay told me, some months afterwards, that the Abbe wanted to be Prime Minister; that he had drawn up a memorial, setting forth that in difficult crises the public good required that there should be a central point (that was his expression), towards which everything should be directed.  Madame de Pompadour would not present the memorial; he insisted, though she said to him, “You will ruin yourself.” The King cast his eyes over it, and said “central point”—­that is to say himself, he wants to be Prime Minister.  Madame tried to apologize for him, and said, “That expression might refer to the Marechal de Belle-Isle.”  “Is he not just about to be made Cardinal?” said the King.  “This is a fine manoeuvre; he knows well enough that, by means of that dignity, he would compel the Ministers to assemble at his house, and then M. l’Abbe would be the central point.  Wherever there is a Cardinal in the council, he is sure, in the end, to take the lead.  Louis XIV., for this reason, did not choose to admit the Cardinal