Had Madame de Coislin had relations with Louis XV.? She never owned so much to me: she admitted, however, that she had been very much loved, but she pretended that she had treated the royal lover with the utmost harshness.
"I have seen him at my feet," she would say to me; "he had charming eyes, and his language was seductive. He offered one day to give me a porcelain dressing-table, like that which Madame de Pompadour had.
"'Oh, Sire,' cried I, 'then I must use it to hide under!'"
By a singular chance I came across this dressing-table at the Marchioness Conyngham's in London; she had received it from George IV., and showed it to me with amusing simplicity.
Madame de Coislin occupied in her house a room opening under the colonnade corresponding to the colonnade of the Wardrobe. Two sea-pieces by Vernet[664], which Louis "the Well-beloved" had given to the noble dame, were hung up on an old green satin tapestry. Madame de Coislin remained lying till two o'clock in the afternoon in a large bed, with curtains also of green silk, seated and propped up by pillows; a sort of nightcap, badly fastened to her head, allowed her grey hairs to escape. Sprigs of diamonds mounted in the old-fashioned way fell upon the shoulder-pieces of her bed-cloak, all covered with snuff, as in the time of the fashionable ladies of the Fronde. Around her, on the bed-clothes, lay scattered the addresses of letters, torn off the letters themselves, and on these addresses Madame de Coislin wrote down her thoughts in every direction: she bought no stationery, the post supplied her with it. From time to time a little dog called Lili put her nose outside the sheets, came to bark at me for five or six minutes, and crept back growling into her mistress' kennel. Thus had time settled the young loves of Louis XV.
Madame de Châteauroux[665] and her two sisters were cousins of Madame de Coislin; the latter would not have been of the humour, as was Madame de Mailly[666], repentant and a Christian, to reply to a man who insulted her with a coarse name in the church of Saint-Roch:
"My friend, since you know me, pray to God for me."
Madame de Coislin, miserly as are many people of wit, piled up her money in cupboards. She lived all devoured by a vermin of crown-pieces which clung to her skin; her servants relieved her. When I found her plunged in a maze of figures, she reminded me of the miser Hermocrates[667], who, when dictating his will, appointed himself his own heir. Nevertheless she gave a dinner occasionally; but she would rail against coffee, which nobody liked, according to her, and which served only to prolong the repast.
Madame de Chateaubriand took a journey to Vichy with Madame de Coislin and the Marquis de Nesle; the marquis went on ahead, and had excellent dinners prepared. Madame de Coislin came after, and asked only for half a pound of cherries. On leaving, she was presented with huge bills, and then there was a terrible outcry. She would not hear of anything except the cherries; the landlord maintained that, whether you ate or did not eat, the custom was, at an inn, to pay for your dinner.
Madame de Coislin had invented a form of illuminism to her own taste. Credulous and incredulous, she was led by her want of faith to laugh at those beliefs the superstition of which frightened her. She had met Madame de Krüdener; the mysterious Frenchwoman was illuminated only under reserve; she did not please the fervent Russian, whom she herself liked no better. Madame de Krüdener said passionately to Madame de Coislin: