He had died only two years ago, when the Dauphin, who had ascended the throne, was just eighteen years old.

The present King was not yet married, but there were rumours of a love-match with a Spanish princess.

He was a boyish king, it seemed, but he played his royal part with intense enjoyment and dignity, and had restored, to the delight of this essentially romantic and imaginative people, most of the glories of the eighteenth-century court, without its scandals.

Certainly France was returning to its old chivalry, and thence to its old power.
Next there was the Cardinal Archbishop of Paris, Cardinal Guinet, a very old ecclesiastic, very high in the counsels of the Church, who would almost certainly have been elected Pope at the last vacancy if it had not been for his age.

He was an "intellectual," it seemed, and, among other things, was one of the first physicists of Europe.