Some old servants of Louis XIV., friends and confidants of the Duke of Maine, alone appeared moved.  The young king was laughing, and the crowd of spectators were amusing themselves with the scene, without any sensible interest in the court intrigues.  The Duchess of Maine made her husband pay for his humble behavior at the council; “she was,” says St. Simon, “at one time motionless with grief, at another boiling with rage, and her poor husband wept daily like a calf at the biting reproaches and strange insults which he had incessantly to pocket in her fits of anger against him.”

In the excess of her indignation and wrath, the Duchess of Maine determined not to confine herself to reproaches.  She had passed her life in elegant entertainments, in sprightly and frivolous intellectual amusements; ever bent on diverting herself, she made up her mind to taste the pleasure of vengeance, and set on foot a conspiracy, as frivolous as her diversions.  The object, however, was nothing less than to overthrow the Duke of Orleans, and to confer the regency on the King of Spain, Philip V., with a council and a lieutenant, who was to be the Duke of Maine.  “When one has once acquired, no matter how, the rank of prince of the blood and the capability of succeeding to the throne,” said the duchess, “one must turn the state upside down, and set fire to the four corners of the kingdom, rather than let them be wrested from one.”  The schemes for attaining this great result were various and confused.  Philip V. had never admitted that his renunciation of the crown of France was seriously binding upon him; he had seen, by the precedent of the war of devolution, how a powerful sovereign may make sport of such acts; his Italian minister, Alberoni, an able and crafty man, who had set the crown of Spain upon the head of Elizabeth Farnese, and had continued to rule her, cautiously egged on his master into hostilities against France.  They counted upon the Parliaments, taking example from that of Paris, on the whole of Brittany, in revolt at the prolongation of the tithe-tax, on all the old court, accustomed to the yoke of the bastards and of Madame de Maintenon, on Languedoc, of which the Duke of Maine was the governor; they talked of carrying off the Duke of Orleans, and taking him to the castle of Toledo; Alberoni promised the assistance of a Spanish army.  The Duchess of Maine had fired the train, without the knowledge, she said, and probably against the will, too, of her husband, more indolent than she in his perfidy.  Some scatter-brains of great houses were mixed up in the affair; MM. de Richelieu, de Laval, and de Pompadour; there was secret coming and going between the castle of Sceaux and the house of the Spanish ambassador, the Prince of Cellamare; M. de Malezieux, the secretary and friend of the duchess, drew up a form of appeal from the French nobility to Philip V., but nobody had signed it, or thought of doing so.  They got pamphlets written by Abbe