Profiting by this calm, the courtiers were chatting.

When not in a bad humor, M.de Mazarin was a very _debonnaire_ prince, and he, who prevented nobody from singing, provided they paid, was not tyrant enough to prevent people from talking, provided they made up their minds to lose.
They were therefore chatting.

At the first table, the king's younger brother, Philip, Duc d'Anjou, was admiring his handsome face in the glass of a box.

His favorite, the Chevalier de Lorraine, leaning over the back of the prince's chair, was listening, with secret envy, to the Comte de Guiche, another of Philip's favorites, who was relating in choice terms the various vicissitudes of fortune of the royal adventurer Charles II.

He told, as so many fabulous events, all the history of his perigrinations in Scotland, and his terrors when the enemy's party was so closely on his track; of nights spent in trees, and days spent in hunger and combats.