216 A 1'IOUS THIEF. 



both of yours.' ' You see/ said the countess in a whisper to me, and with 



a terrified air, ' that it is La Marechale de N they allude to, and this is 



not her first exploit of the kind.' In fact, I perfectly recollected that La 

 Marechale had been accused of several similar transgressions, and particu- 

 larly of having cribbed, as the vulgar would say, a part of the arm of La 

 Bienheureuse Jeanne de Chantal. She had borrowed this relic from the 

 sisters of La Visitation, who never could get her to return it. They dis- 

 covered at last that the relic had been dissolved in a medicine, after having 

 been pounded in a mortar in her own presence, and given to her son, the 

 young Duke D'A., in the hope that it would cure him of the measles. 



" As our liveries and armorial bearings were the same, the crowd assem- 

 bled round the church had taken her equipage for mine. But some time 

 after it was ascertained by whom the theft had really been committed. The 

 archbishop consequently sent his proctor to the hotel de N., and La Mare- 

 chale said, in her defence, that a stolen relic being necessary for her purpose, 

 she had preferred taking upon herself all the responsibility than exposing 

 any other person to the penalty of sacrilege. It was on this occasion that 

 the Archbishop of Paris and the Bishop of Chartre took the precaution of 

 forbidding her the communion, which was generally blamed, because they 

 did not choose to publish their motives. 



" Those who had no tlived on terms of intimacy with La Marechale would 

 never have taken her to be cracked, or have imagined that she carried on an 

 epistolary correspondence with the Holy Virgin and the Patriarchs. She 

 used to d'eposit her letters in a pigeon-house at the hotel de N. As she re- 

 gularly found answers to them, it is supposed that these were written by her 

 chaplain, the famous Abbe Grisel. She was sometimes indignant at the 

 familiar tone assumed towards her ' de la part/ so she expressed herself, 

 ' d'une petite bourgeoise de Nazareth.' 



" She had discovered, or thought she had discovered, for she was always 

 in search of superstitious ideas, that she had an ancestor in the noble house 

 of the Loups of Gascony, from which so many ' gentillatres' have pretended 

 to be descended. La Marechale was in consequence convinced that the 

 Fairy Mellusene would appear at the foot of her bed whenever a descendant 

 of the said Mellusene and of Count Geoffroy, her husband, was to die. It is 

 most singular that La Marechale correctly prophesied the death of forty or 

 fifty persons, of which she said she had been warned by that means. Ex- 

 plain this as you will, but the fact is certain. 



" One evening, at the menagerie at Versailles, she ordered the lion cage 

 to be thrown open. The animals appeared confounded ; apparently their 

 instinct told them that there was not much to be got out of an old woman 

 so dry, and so well defended by at least thirty ells of thick silk spread 

 on hoops, and padded out by ' matelassures insipides,' as the doctors would 

 say ; but the fact is certain, that the lions only stared in her face, and 

 allowed her to quit their den as she went in. The diocesan bishop of the 

 menagerie, who was M. de Chartres, undertook to make it a case of con- 

 science ; but she gave him a good setting down, and told him he had never 

 read his Bible, or that he was a man of little faith, * as it was well known 

 that lions could never do any thing against the house of Levis' (to two 

 gentlemen of which name she happened to be related by marriage). 



" The Abbess of the Abbaye aux Bris, who perished on the revolutionary 

 scaffold in 1793, used to relate an amusing story of La Marechale. She 

 arrived one day at the Altar de Notre Dame,, bowing and complimenting the 

 statue of the Virgin, in the style of the best society. The prayer of the day 

 was to obtain for Marshal N., the husband of the petitioner, a sum of 

 18,000frs. which he was in want of; afterwards, the Order of the Garter, 

 which he was very desirous of obtaining, as it was the only great honour 

 that had never entered his family, and finally the diploma of Prince of the 



