admire you, whatever be their faith and communion."

"Petitot, you are an admirable painter and a most worthy man. Do not
answer me, I beg you. If I believed you had as much genius and aptitude
for great affairs as for the wonders of the brush, I would make you a
Counsellor of State on the instant, and a half-hour spent with me and my
documents and papers of importance would be sufficient to make you
believe and think as I do touching what has been discussed between us.
Madame de Montespan, in great alarm, has told me that you wished to leave
me. You leave me, my good friend! Where will you find a sky so pure and
soft as the sky of France? Where will you find a King more tenderly
attached to men of merit, more particularly, to my dear and illustrious
Petitot?"

At these words, pronounced with emotion, the artist felt the tears come
into his eyes. He bent one knee to the ground, respectfully kissed the
hand of the monarch, and promised to complete his portrait immediately.

He kept his word to us. The King's miniature and my four portraits were
finished without hesitation or postponement; and Petitot also consented
to copy, for his Majesty, a superb Christine of Sweden, a full-length
picture, painted by Le Bourdon. But at the final revocation of the Edict
of Nantes, he thought his conscience, or rather his vanity, compromised,
and quitted France, although the King offered to allow him a chaplain of
his communion, and a dispensation from all the oaths, to Petitot himself,
to Boyer, his brother-in-law, and the chaplain whom they had retained
with them.