UNEASINESS OF M. DU MAINE. 311

who, moreover, feared that the slightest contradiction would
entirely turn her brain, suffered all this, even piteously doing
the honours as often as he could without ceasing in his conduct
to the King.

However great might Tbe his joy, whatever the unimaginable
greatness to which he had arrived, he was not tranquil. Like
those tyrants who have usurped by their crimes the sovereign
power, and who fear as so many conspiring enemies all their
fallen citizens they have enslaved—he felt as though seated
under that sword that Dionysius, tyrant of Syracuse, suspended
by a hair over his table, above the head of a man whom he
placed there because he believed him happy, and in this manner
wished to make him feel what passed unceasingly in himself.
M. du Maine, who willingly expressed in pleasantry the most
serious things, frankly said to his familiars, that ho was " like a
louse between two finger-nails " (the princes of the blood and
the peers), by which he could not fail to be cracked if he did
not take care ! This reflection troubled the excess of his plea-
sure, and that of the greatness and the power to which so many
artifices had elevated him. He feared the princes of the blood
as soon as they should be of age to feel the infamy and the
danger of the wound he had given them; he feared the parlia-
ment, which even under his eyes had not been able to dissimu-
late its indignation at the violence he had committed against
the most holy and the most inviolable laws; he even feared the
Dukes, so timid are injustice and tyranny !