Had chignons been then in fashion, much trouble might have been saved the fair Cécile; who, finding that a hasty departure from Turkey alone could save her, demanded, but in vain, a passport from the Bashaw of Smyrna or Izmir. Urged by her father Achmet, she quitted secretly by sea, and was landed by a French frigate at Toulon, where she learned from the lieutenant of a Maltese galley that her lover had perished in a duel.
Her journey to Turkey had greatly impoverished her, and now she found herself in France almost without a friend, with only five hundred ducats and a diamond, the gift of her father Achmet III. Choosing to conceal her fallen fortune from every eye, she selected an humble dwelling in an obscure part of the city, where, long years after, her editor first discovered her, and where, at a distance from royal thrones, from human wealth and grandeur, she had sought to pass the evening of her days in peace and obscurity. "God has blessed my fortitude," she concludes. "Born in 1710, I have lived to see the 1st of January, 1786, and must now serenely and tranquilly await that peace by which death must make amends for all the surprising and afflicting changes of fortune which I experienced in my passage through life."
Cécile—if ever she existed at all—must have been then in her 76th year. Her narrative is certainly mentioned in the "Journal de Paris;" but in the tide of events that so rapidly followed the year in which the financial troubles of France began, the meeting of the States-General, and the crash of the first Revolution following, we hear no more of "La belle Turque," the soi-disant daughter of the dethroned Achmet III.
THE MARQUIS DE FRATTEAUX,
CAPTAIN OF FRENCH HORSE.
Few events made a greater sensation in England generally, and more particularly in London, in March, 1752, than the mysterious disappearance or abduction—it was called for a time the murder—of the unfortunate Marquis de Fratteaux, who was actually dragged by force from the heart of the English metropolis, and immured in the Bastile, to gratify the strange and unnatural hatred of his own father.
This noble, whose name was Louis Mathieu Bertin, Marquis de Fratteaux, Chevalier of the Order of St. Louis, and a distinguished young captain of French cavalry, was the eldest son of M. Jean Bertin de St. Geyran (Honorary Master of Requests and Counsellor to the Parliament of Bordeaux) and of his wife Lucretia de St. Chamant, both of whose families were deemed, by character and descent, most honourable among the Bordelais. In the Blazon ou Art Héraldique,* Bertin is represented as bearing an escutcheon argent, charged with a saltire (simple) dentelé.
* French Encyclopaedie, 1789.
From his birth, the Marquis Louis Mathieu was an object of aversion to his father, who, on the other hand, doted even to absurdity on his youngest son, on whom he lavished all his love and his livres, and on whom he bestowed the estate of Bourdeille. M. Bertin would seem, almost, from the birth of his second boy, to have determined, by every scheme he could devise, to deprive the eldest of his birthright; and this object he followed with singular rancour nearly to the end of his life.