When the Queen had the government of the country, all the females of the Court, even to the very servants, became intriguers.  They say it was the most ridiculous thing in the world to see the eagerness with which women meddled with the Queen-mother’s regency.  At the commencement she knew nothing at all.  She made a present to her first femme de chambre of five large farms, upon which the whole Court subsisted.  When she went to the Council to propose the affair, everybody laughed, and she was asked how she proposed to live.  She was quite astonished when the thing was explained to her, for she thought she had only given away five ordinary farms.  This anecdote is very true and was related to me by the old Chancellor Le Tellier, who was present at the Council.  She is said often to have laughed as she confessed her ignorance.  Many other things of a similar nature happened during the regency.

There is a Bishop of a noble family, tolerably young but very ugly, who was at first so devout that he thought of entering La Trappe; he wore his hair combed down straight, and dared not look a woman in the face.  Having learned that in the city where he held his see there was a frail fair one, whose gallantries had become notorious, he felt a great desire to convert her and to make her come to the confessional.  She was, it is said, a very pretty woman, and had, moreover, a great deal of wit.

No sooner had the Bishop began to visit than he began to pay attention to his hair:  first he powdered it, and then he had it dressed.  At length he swallowed the bait so completely, that he neither quitted the fair siren by night nor by day.  His clergy ventured to exhort him to put an end to this scandal, but he replied that, if they did not cease their remonstrances, he would find means of making them.  At length he even rode through the city in his carriage with his fair penitent.

The people became so enraged at this that they pelted him with stones.  His relations repaired to his diocese for the purpose of exhorting him in their turn, but he would only receive his mother, and would not even follow her advice.  His relations then applied to the Regent to summon the lady to Paris.  She came, but her lover followed and recovered her; at length she was torn from him by a lettre-de-cachet, and taken from his arms to a house of correction.  The Bishop is in a great rage, and declares that he will never forgive his family for the affront which has been put upon him (1718).

The Queen-mother is said to have eaten four times a day in a frightful manner, and this practice is supposed to have brought on that cancer in the breast, which she sought to conceal by strong Spanish perfumes, and of which she died.