Whilst these dreams of ambition were being seriously presented to the unhappy Imperial Court of Vienna, the Turks, to the number of 300,000 men, had swept across Hungary like a torrent.  They arrived before the capital of the Empire of Germany just at the moment when the Court had left it.  They immediately invested this panic-stricken town, and the inhabitants of Vienna believed themselves lost.  But the young Duc de Lorraine, our King’s implacable enemy, had left the capital in the best condition and pitched outside Vienna, in a position from which he could severely harass the besieging Turks.

He tormented them, he raided them, while he waited for the saving reinforcements which were to be brought up by the King of Poland, and the natural allies of the Empire.  This succour arrived at last, and after four or five combats, well directed and most bloody, they threw the Ottomans into disorder.  The Duc de Lorraine immortalised himself during this brilliant campaign, which he finished by annihilating the Turks near Barkan.

France had remained in a state of inaction in the midst of all these great events.  I saw the discomfiture of our ministers and the King when the success of the Imperialists reached them.  But the time had passed when my affections and those of my master were akin.  Free from henceforth to follow the impulses of my conscience and of my sense of justice, I rejoiced sincerely at the great qualities of the poor Duc de Lorraine, and at the humiliation of the cruel Turks, who had been so misled.

The elective princes of the Germanic Empire once more rallied round their august head, and disavowed almost all their secret communications with the Cabinet of Versailles.  The Emperor, having escaped from these great perils, addressed some noble and touching complaints to our monarch; and Monseigneur was not elected King of the Romans,—­a disappointment which he hardly noticed, and by which he was very little disturbed.

CHAPTER XXVII.

The Prince of Orange.—­The Orange Coach.—­The Bowls of Oranges.—­The Orange Blossoms.—­The Town of Orange.—­Jesuits of Orange.—­Revocation of the Edict of Nantes.

The King, by the last peace, signed at Nimegue, had engaged to restore the Principality of Orange to William, Stadtholder and Generalissimo of the Dutch.  This article was one of those which he had found most repugnant to him, for nothing can be compared with the profound aversion which the mere name inspired in the monarch.  He pushed this hatred so far that, having one day noticed from the heights of his balcony a superb new equipage, of which the body was painted with orange-coloured varnish, he sent and asked the name of the owner; and, on their reporting to him that this coach belonged to a provincial intendant, a relative of the Chancellor, his Majesty said, the same evening, to the magistrate-minister:  “Your relative ought to show more discretion in the choice of the colours he displays.”