Francesca, from where she stood, could hear the Queen giving a laughing account of the Due de Domville's attachment to Mademoiselle Menneville, the prettiest of her maids of honour, all of whom were pretty. It is a passion of the good old time, and has already lasted some four years; but Madame la Duchesse de Vantadour, his mother, will not hear of it. Never before was a lover of fifty so put out, to think that he cannot yet have his own way. Not content with his own cares, when obliged to be absent he leaves his almoner to take charge of her. It is gallantry equally antediluvian and interminable; I suppose they will be married one day, and buried the next.
Nanny Broome was looking up at the outer wall. Just under the ceiling there were three lunette windows, heavily barred and blacked out in the normal way by centuries of grime.
to vest a person with an estate
But behind the impressive infrastructure already in Puyang, that includes broad streets and big squares, is a mountain of local debt. According to a government document, Hualong, the downtown district that houses the current railway station and future high-speed railway terminal, had implicit off-budget liability – borrowing through local financing vehicles or from guaranteeing local development loans – of 2.6 billion yuan (US$378 million) at the end of June 2018, three times its on-budget debt.
