two courts remained friendly till 1693, at which time they were
strained by the refusal of France to return the Moorish captives who
were employed on the king's galleys, and who were probably as much
needed there as the Sultan's Christian slaves for the building of
Moorish palaces.

[Illustration: _From a photograph from the Service des Beaux-Arts au
Maroc_

Meknez--gate: "Bab-Mansour"]

Six years later the Sultan despatched Abdallah-ben-Aïssa to France to
reopen negotiations. 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. But he came back without a treaty.

Moulay-Ismaël, whose long reign (1673 to 1727) and extraordinary
exploits make him already a legendary figure, conceived, early in his
career, a passion for Meknez; and through all his troubled rule, with
its alternations of barbaric warfare and far-reaching negotiations,
palace intrigue, crazy bloodshed and great administrative reforms, his
heart perpetually reverted to the wooded slopes on which he dreamed of
building a city more splendid than Fez or Marrakech.

"The Sultan" (writes his chronicler Aboul Kasim-ibn-Ahmad, called
"Ezziani") "loved Meknez, the climate of which had enchanted him, and he
would have liked never to leave it." He left it, indeed, often, left it