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274 so. There was consequently a furious general combat; the strongest overthrew the weakest, and the weakest, as I have before told you, was the Prince.

Babiole, in a state of distraction, ran out on the high road without coach or guards. She plunged into a wood and fainted away at the foot of a tree. The Fairy Fanferluche, who never slept, and was always on the watch for opportunities to do mischief, came and carried her off in a cloud blacker than ink, and which flew faster than the wind.

The Princess remained for some time perfectly unconscious. At length she came to herself. Never was surprise equal to hers, at finding herself so far from the ground and so near to the pole. The floor of a cloud is not solid, so that as she ran here and there it seemed to her that she was treading on feathers; and the cloud opening a little she had a narrow escape of falling through. She found no one to complain to, for the wicked Fanferluche had made herself invisible. Babiole had leisure to think of her dear Prince, and the condition in which she had left him, and she gave herself up to the most poignant grief that could possess a living soul. "How!" exclaimed she, "am I yet capable of surviving him I love; and can the fear of approaching death find a place in my heart? Oh, if the sun would roast me he would do me a kindness; or if I could drown myself in the rainbow, how happy I should be! but, alas, the whole zodiac is deaf to my voice: the sagittary has no darts, the bull no horns, the lion no teeth. Perhaps the earth will be more obliging, and offer me the sharp point of some rock on which I may kill myself. O Prince, my dear cousin! why are you not here to see me make the most tragic leap that a despairing lover could think of!" As she uttered these words she rushed to the end of the cloud, and sprang from it with the force of an arrow from a bow.

All who saw her thought it was the moon falling; and as it was then in the wane, many who adored it, and who remained for some time without seeing it, went into deep mourning, and were convinced that the sun out of jealousy had played it this wicked trick.

Much as the Infanta desired to kill herself she did not succeed. She fell into the glass-bottle in which the fairies usually keep their ratafia in the sun. But what a bottle!