On the 17th of April a rascal was brought in who was near surprising my son in the Bois de Boulogne a year ago.  He is a dismissed colonel; his name is La Jonquiere.  He had written to my son demanding enormous pensions and rewards; but meeting with a refusal, he went into Spain, where he promised Alberoni to carry off my son, and deliver him into his hands, dead or alive.  He brought one hundred men with him, whom he put in ambuscade near Paris.  He missed my son only by a quarter of an hour in the Bois de Boulogne, which the latter had passed through in his way to La Muette, where he went to dine with his daughter.  La Jonquiere having thus failed, retired in great vexation to the Low Countries, where he boasted that, although he had missed this once, he would take his measures so much better in future that people should soon hear of a great blow being struck.  This was luckily repeated to my son, who had him arrested at Liege.  He sent a clever fellow to him, who caught him, and leading him out of the house where they were, he clapped a pistol to his throat, and threatened to shoot him on the spot if he did not go with him and without speaking a word.  The rascal, overcome with terror, suffered himself to be taken to the boat, but when he saw that they were approaching the French territory he did not wish to go any further; he said he was ruined, and should be drawn and quartered.  They bound him and carried him to the Bastille.

I have exhorted my son to take care of himself, and not to go out but in a carriage.  He has promised that he will not, but I cannot trust him.

The late Monsieur was desirous that his son’s wife should not be a coquette.  This was not the particular which I so much disapproved of; but I wished the husband not to be informed of it, or that it should get abroad, which would have had no other effect than that of convincing my son that his wife had dishonoured him.

I must never talk to my son about the conspiracy in the presence of Madame d’Orleans; it would be wounding her in the tenderest place; for all that concerns her brother is to her the law and the prophets.

My son has so satisfactorily disproved the accusations of that old Maintenon and the Duc du Maine, that the King has believed him, and, after a minute examination, has done my son justice.  But Madame d’Orleans has not conducted herself well in this affair; she has spread by means of her creatures many calumnies against my son, and has even said that he wanted to poison her.  By such means she has made her peace with old Maintenon, who could not endure her before.  I have often admired the patience with which my son suffers all this, when he knows it just as well as I do.  If things had remained as Madame de Maintenon had arranged them at the death of the King, my son would only have been nominally Regent, and the Duc du Maine would actually have enjoyed all the power.  She thought because my son was in the habit of running