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Madame du Châtelet was unfortunately indisposed to accept either poetry, or friendship, or even geometry, as a complete substitute for a lover's devotion, and did not reject the opportunity, when it was offered, of obtaining that sympathy which was no longer bestowed by the philosophic poet. At Luneville, sometimes at Commercy, a few miles over the frontier, Stanislaus, the father of Louis XV.'s queen, once king of Poland in reality, and still keeping the title, held his Court as Duke of Lorraine—that being the dominion which the greater Powers had, in the course of their negotiations (high-principled and disinterested as those of great Powers usually are), assigned to him in compensation for the loss of his kingdom; and here Voltaire and his Emilie were warmly-welcomed guests. The monarch, in the absence of other domestic companionship, had concluded a left-handed alliance with the Marquise de Boufflers (the title of Marquise appears to have been almost as fatal to propriety as that of Abbé), who, in turn, had bestowed her left hand upon Monsieur de St Lambert, a young guardsman about the Court of Lorraine. Stanislaus objected to the attentions of the good-looking guardsman, who, accordingly, could only join Madame de Boufflers' card and supper parties after the dethroned potentate had gone to