de La Force had tied the bag about his neck, broke, and the bag fell at his feet.  His thoughts appeared to undergo a sudden change, and Mdlle. de La Force seemed to him to be as ugly as she really is.  He went instantly to the Prince and his other relations who were there, and told them what had just happened.  They searched about in the garden for the bag and the strings, and, opening it, they found it to contain two toads’ feet holding a heart wrapped up in a bat’s wing, and round the whole a paper inscribed with unintelligible cyphers.  The Marquis was seized with horror at the sight.  He told me this story with his own mouth.  Mdlle. de La Force after this fell in love with Baron, but as he was not bewitched, the intrigue did not last long:  he used to give a very amusing account of the declaration she made to him.  Then a M. Briou, the son of a Councillor of that name, became attached to her; his relations, who would by no means have consented to such a marriage, shut the young man up.  La Force, who has a very fertile wit, engaged an itinerant musician who led about dancing bears in the street, and intimated to her lover that, if he would express a wish to see the bears dance in the courtyard of his, own house, she would come to him disguised in a bear’s skin.  She procured a bear’s skin to be made so as to fit her, and went to M. Briou’s house with the bears; the young man, under the pretence of playing with this bear, had an opportunity of conversing with her and of laying their future plans.  He then promised his father that he would submit to his will, and thus having regained his liberty he immediately married Mdlle. de La Force, and went with her to Versailles, where the King gave them apartments, and where Madame de Briou was every day with the Dauphine of Bavaria, who admired her wit and was delighted with her society.  M. de Briou was not then five-and-twenty years of age, a very good-looking and well-bred young man.  His father, however, procured a dissolution of the marriage by the Parliament, and made him marry another person.  Madame de Briou thus became once more Mdlle. de La Force, and found herself without husband and money.  I cannot tell how it was that the King and her parents, both of whom had consented to the marriage, did not oppose its dissolution.  To gain a subsistence she set about composing romances, and as she was often staying with the Princesse de Conti, she dedicated to her that of Queen Margaret.

We have had four Dukes who have bought coffee, stuffs, and even candles for the purpose of selling them again at a profit.  It was the Duke de La Force who bought the candles.  One evening, very recently, as he was going out of the Opera, the staircase was filled with young men, one of whom cried out, as he passed, “His purse!”—­“No,” said another, “there can be no money in it; he would not risk it; it must be candles that he has bought to sell again.”  They then sang the air of the fourth act of ‘Phaeton’.