CHAPTER XVIII
Intrigue of the comtesse d'Egmont with a shopman--His unhappy
fate--The comtesse du Barry protects him--Conduct of Louis XV
upon the occasion--The young man quits France--Madame du Barry's
letter to the comtesse d'Egmont--Quarrel with the marechal
de Richelieu
The comtesse d'Egmont was one day observed to quit her house
attired with the most parsimonious simplicity; her head being
covered by an enormously deep bonnet, which wholly concealed her
countenance, and the rest of her person enveloped in a pelisse,
whose many rents betrayed its long service. In this strange
dress she traversed the streets of Paris in search of adventures.
She was going, she said, wittily enough, "to return to the cits
what her father and brother had so frequently robbed them of."
Chance having led her steps to the rue St. Martin, she was
stopped there by a confusion of carriages, which compelled her
first to shelter herself against the wall, and afterwards to take
refuge in an opposite shop, which was one occupied by a linen-draper.
She looked around her with the eye of a connoisseur, and perceived
beneath the modest garb of a shopman one of those broad-shouldered
youths, whose open smiling countenance and gently tinged complexion
bespoke a person whose simplicity of character differed greatly from
the vast energy of his physical powers: he resembled the Farnese
Hercules upon a reduced scale.
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