quia d'Harcourt, in whose train the Marquis de Ble court first went to 

 Spain, was sent ambassador to Madrid in the month of December, 1697. 



It is barely possible that, in the eight or nine weeks that intervened 

 between the appointment of the Marquis d'Harcourt and the death of 

 Yillars, the ''Memoires de la Cour d'Espagne" in which there is inter- 

 nal evidence to prove that they were written by a cotemporary of the 

 events which they describe,! might have been given to Ble court, an 

 attache to the embassy of the Marquis d'Harcourt. The improbability, 

 however, of his having done so, is so striking that it scarcely requires to be 

 pointed out. No connexion whatever between the Marquis de Yillars and 

 the Marquis de Blecourt has been asserted, even by the most credulous 

 believer in the alleged authorship, by the former, of the Me moires de la 

 Cour d'Espagne." JN'o reason can be suggested, either of private friend- 

 ship or public duty, for the Marquis de Villars, in the last days of his 

 protracted life, putting into the hands of a stranger a manuscript con- 

 taining, as I shall prove, the most cruel reflections on the memory of the 

 niece of his sovereign. This princess, Louisa of Orleans, the young 

 Queen of Spain, the object of so much censure in the *'Memoires," had 

 been eight years dead, and her place filled almost for the same period 

 by a stranger to those Memoires,'* the less popular and less attractive 

 Maria Anne of I^"ewburg. The Queen Dowager, another of the promi- 

 nent characters in the ''Memoires," had just died. The Duke of Me- 

 dina-Celi had been dead since 1691. Everj^thing was changed. Eor 

 practical purposes, Yillars might as well have given to Blecourt a copy 

 of the romance of Cyrus, from which he derived his surname of Oron- 

 dates, as a history of the Spanish Court as it existed eighteen years be- 

 fore. If it were intended for his amusement, the rifacimento of Ma- 

 dame d'Aulnoy, already in print for seven years, would have answered 

 the purpose much better. "Why burden a soldier's baggage with a large 

 manuscript in folio, when he could have carried the whole matter in 

 print in the Hague edition of 1692, in the compass of a pack of cards ?J 

 That the author of the ''Memoires de la Cour d'Espagne" was aware of 

 the use which had been made of them by Madame d'Aulnoy, in 1690, 

 may be considered certain. That they were not then in any public de- 

 pository, and could not have been consulted without the express sanction 

 of the writer, admits of little doubt. As mu ch of them as could be pub- 

 lished without giving offence having appeared under the name of a lively 

 and popular authoress, who seems to have had a privilege for such reve- 

 lations, the original writer's interest in them seemed to cease. How 

 the editor of the volume of 1733 could have been ignorant of Madame 



* " Histoire Generale de la Diplomatie Fran9aise," par M. de Flassan, Paris, 1811 ; 

 seconde edition, t. iv., p. 190 ; also " Memoirs of the Marquis de Torcy," London, 1755, 

 vol. i., p. 13 ; and "Biographic Universelle," t. xix., p. 404. 



t This will be made made manifest when I come to speak of the MS. " Memoires de 

 la Cour d'Espagne," in the library of the Arsenal at Paris. 



X My copy of Madame d'Aulnoy 's " Memoires de la Cour d'Espagne" (the Hague, 

 1692) is about b\ inches long, by 2^ inches wide. 



