The Regent saw the necessity of firmness.  “It is a maxim,” he declared, “that the king is always a major as regards justice; that which was done without the states-general has no need of their intervention to be undone.”  The decree of the council of regency, based on the same principles, suppressed the right of succession to the crown, and cut short all pretensions on the part of the legitimatized princes’ issue to the rank of princes of the blood; the rights thereto were maintained in the case of the Duke of Maine and the Count of Toulouse, for their lives, by the bounty of the Regent, “which did not prevent the Duchess of Maine from uttering loud shrieks, like a maniac,” says St. Simon, “or the Duchess of Orleans from weeping night and day, and refusing for two months to see anybody.”  Of the thirty-nine members of the nobility who had signed the petition to Parliament, six were detained in prison for a month, after which the Duke of Orleans pardoned them.  “You know me, well enough to be aware that I am only nasty when I consider myself positively obliged to be,” he said to them.  The patrons, whose cause these noblemen had lightly embraced, were not yet at the end of their humiliations.

[Illustrations:  The Duchess of Maine——­72]

The Duke of Bourbon was not satisfied with their exclusion from the succession to the throne; he claimed the king’s education, which belonged of right, he said, to the first prince of the blood, being a major.  In his hatred, then, towards the legitimatized, he accepted with alacrity the Duke of St. Simon’s proposal to simply reduce them to their rank by seniority in the peerage, with the proviso of afterwards restoring the privileges of a prince of the blood in favor of the Count of Toulouse alone, as a reward for his services in the navy.  The blow thus dealt gratified all the passions of the House of Conde and the wrath of Law, as well as that of the keeper of the seals, D’Argenson, against the Parliament, which for three months past had refused to enregister all edicts.  On the 24th of August, 1718, at six in the morning, the Parliament received orders to repair to the Tuileries, where the king was to hold a bed of justice., The Duke of Maine, who was returning from a party, was notified, as colonel of the Swiss, to have his regiment under arms; at eight o’clock the council of regency was already assembled; the Duke of Maine and the Count of Toulouse arrived in peer’s robes.  The Regent had flattered himself that they would not come to the bed of justice, and had not summoned them.  He at once advanced towards the Count of Toulouse, and said out loud that he was surprised to see him in his robes, and that he had not thought proper to notify him of the bed of justice, because he knew that, since the last edict, he did not like going to the Parliament.  The Count of Toulouse replied that that was quite true, but that, when it was a question of the welfare of the State, he put every other consideration aside.