Such scruples did not stop Catherine I., widow of Peter the Great, who had taken the power into her own hands to the detriment of the czar's grandson; she offered the duke her second daughter, the grand-duchess Elizabeth, for King Louis XV., with a promise of abjuration on the part of the princess, and of a treaty which should secure the support of all the Muscovite forces in the interest of France.

At the same time the same negotiators proposed to the Duke of Bourbon himself the hand of Mary Leckzinska, daughter of Stanislaus, the dispossessed King of Poland, guaranteeing to him, on the death of King Augustus, the crown of that kingdom.
[Illustration: Mary Leczinska----121] The proposals of Russia were rejected.

"The Princess of Muscovy," M.de Morville had lately said, "is the daughter of a low-born mother, and has been brought up amidst a still barbarous people." Every great alliance appeared impossible; the duke and Madame de Prie were looking out for a queen who would belong to them, and would secure them the king's heart.
Their choice fell upon Mary Leckzinska, a good, gentle, simple creature, without wit or beauty, twenty-two years old, and living upon the alms of France with her parents, exiles and refugees at an old commandery of the Templars at Weissenburg.

Before this King Stanislaus had conceived the idea of marrying his daughter to Count d'Estrees; the marriage had failed through the Regent's refusal to make the young lord a duke and peer.

The distress of Stanislaus, his constant begging letters to the court of France, were warrant for the modest submissiveness of the princess.
"Madame de Prie has engaged a queen, as I might engage a valet to-morrow," writes Marquis d'Argenson;--it is a pity." When the first overtures from the duke arrived at Weissenburg, King Stanislaus entered the room where his wife and daughter were at work, and, "Fall we on our knees, and thank God!" he said.