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soup, or a dish of sausages eaten in congenial company. She lunched daily alone, on hated French messes, stared at by twenty footmen, from whose supercilious eyes she was glad to escape with hunger still unsatisfied. Madame detested sermons. She listened to them endlessly without complaint, and was grateful for the occasional privilege of a nap. Madame liked cards. She was not permitted to play, nor even to show herself at the lansquenet table. She never gambled,—in fact, she had no money,—and it was a fancy of her husband's that she brought him ill luck by hovering near. Neither was she allowed to retire. "All the old women who do not play have to be entertained by me," she writes with surpassing good humor. "This goes on from seven to ten, and makes me yawn frightfully." Supper was eaten at the royal table, where the guests often waited three quarters of an hour for the king to appear, and where nobody spoke a word during the meal. "I live as though I were quite alone in the world," confesses this friendless exile to her favorite correspondent, the Raugravine Louise. "But I am resigned to such a state of things, and