She wishes to reign; but she knows nothing of true grandeur, having been educated in too low a manner.  She might live well as a simple duchess; but not as one of the Royal Family of France.  It is too true that she has always been ambitious of possessing, not my son’s heart, but his power; she is always in fear lest some one else should govern him.  Her establishment is well regulated; my son has always let her be mistress in this particular.  As to her children, I let them go on in their own way; they were brought here without my consent, and it is for others to take care of them.  Sometimes she displays more affection for her brother than even for her children.  An ambitious woman as she is, having it put into her head by her brother that she ought to be the Regent, can love none but him.  She would like to see him Regent better than her husband, because he has persuaded her that she shall reign with him; she believes it firmly, although every one else knows that his own wife is too ambitious to permit any one but herself to reign.  Besides her ambition she has a great deal of ill-temper.  She will never pardon either the nun of Chelles or Mademoiselle de Valois, because they did not like her nephew with the long lips.  Her anger is extremely bitter, and she will never forgive.  She loves only her relations on the maternal side.  Madame de Sforza, her favourite, is the daughter of Madame de Thianges, Madame de Montespan’s sister, and therefore a cousin of Madame d’Orleans, who hates her sister and her nephew worse than the Devil.

I could forgive her all if she were not so treacherous.  She flatters me when I am present, but behind my back she does all in her power to set the Duchesse de Berri against me; she tells her not to believe that I love her, but that I wish to have her sister with me.  Madame d’Orleans believes that her daughter, Madame de Berri, loves her less than her father.  It is true that the daughter has not a very warm attachment to her mother, but she does her duty to her; and yet the more they are full of mutual civilities the more they quarrel.  On the 4th of October, 1718, Madame de Berri having invited her father to go and sleep at La Muette, to see the vintage feast and dance which were to be held on the next day.  Madame d’Orleans wrote to Madame de Berri, and asked her if she thought it consistent with the piety of the Carmelites that she should ask her father to sleep in her house.  Madame de Berri replied that it had never been thought otherwise than pious that a parent should sleep in his daughter’s house.  The mother did this only to annoy her husband and daughter, and when she chooses she has a very cutting way.  It may be imagined how this letter was received by the father and daughter.  I arrived at La Muette just as it had come.  My son dare not complain to me, for as often as he does, I say to him, “George Dandin, you would have it so:”—­[Moliere]—­he therefore only laughed and said nothing.  I did not wish to add to the bitterness which this had occasioned, for that would have been to blow a fire already too hot; I confined myself, therefore, to observing that when she wrote it she probably had the spleen.