Energy, if not excess, seemed legitimatized.

According to Spanish law, the town in which one is baptized is recognized as his legal birthplace, so it was easy enough to legitimatize the infant Campos.

The ambassador was as brilliantly received and as eagerly run after as a modern statesman on an official mission, and his candidly expressed admiration for the personal charms of the Princesse de Conti, one of the French monarch's legitimatized children, is supposed to have been mistaken by the court for an offer of marriage from the Emperor of Barbary.

The king had made the Parliament legitimatize the Duke of Maine, Mdlle. de Nantes, and the Count of Vexin; they were now formally installed at Versailles.

The day was a decisive one; the legitimatized princes were present, "the Duke of Maine bursting with joy," says St. Simon; "a smiling, satisfied air overrippled that of audacity, of confidence, which nevertheless peeped through, and the politeness which seemed to struggle against it.

Easy-going, indolent, often absorbed by his pleasures, the Regent found no great difficulty in putting up with the exaltation of the legitimatized princes; it had been for him sufficient to wrest authority from the Duke of Maine, he let him enjoy the privileges of a prince of the blood.

He drew after him the Count of Charolais his brother, and the Prince of Conti his cousin; on the 22d of April, 1716, all three presented to the king a request for the revocation of Louis XIV.'s edict declaring his legitimatized sons princes of the blood, and capable of succeeding to the throne.

" [Illustration: The Duke of Maine71] All this toil ended in the following declaration on the part of the legitimatized princes: "The affair, being one of state, cannot be decided but by a king, who is a major, or indeed by the States-general."

In his hatred, then, towards the legitimatized, he accepted with alacrity the Duke of St. Simon's proposal to simply reduce them to their rank by seniority in the peerage, with the proviso of afterwards restoring the privileges of a prince of the blood in favor of the Count of Toulouse alone, as a reward for his services in the navy.

They had just read the decree reducing the legitimatized to their degree in the peerage, and M. le Duc had claimed the superintendence of the king's education, when it was announced that the Parliament, in their scarlet robes, were arriving in the court of the palace.