The Parliament not only opposed the edict, and would not allow it to pass, but also refused to give any opinion, and rejected the affair altogether.  For this reason my son had a company of the footguard placed on Sunday morning at the entrance of the palace to prevent their assembling; and, at the same time, he addressed a letter to the Premier-President, and to the Parliament a ‘lettre-de-cachet’, ordering them to repair to Pontoise to hold their sittings.  The next day, when the musketeers had relieved the guards, the young fellows, not knowing what to do to amuse themselves, resolved to play at a parliament.  They elected a chief and other presidents, the King’s ministers, and the advocates.  These things being settled, and having received a sausage and a pie for breakfast, they pronounced a sentence, in which they condemned the sausage to be cooked and the pie to be cut up.

All these things make me tremble for my son.  I receive frequently anonymous letters full of dreadful menaces against him, assuring me that two hundred bottles of wine have been poisoned for him, and, if this should fail, that they will make use of a new artificial fire to burn him alive in the Palais Royal.

It is too true that Madame d’Orleans loves her brother better than her husband.

The Duc du Maine says that if, by his assistance, the King should obtain the direction of his own affairs, he would govern him entirely, and would be more a monarch than the King, and that after my son’s death he would reign with his sister.

A week ago I received letters in which they threatened to burn my son at the Palais Royal and me at Saint Cloud.  Lampoons are circulated in Paris.

My son has already slept several times at the Tuileries, but I fear that the King will not be able to accustom himself to his ways, for my son could never in his life play with children:  he does not like them.

He was once beloved, but since the arrival of that cursed Law he is hated more and more.  Not a week passes without my receiving by the post letters filled with frightful threats, in which my son is spoken of as a bad man and a tyrant.

I have just now received a letter in which he is threatened with poison.  When I showed it to him he did nothing but laugh, and said the Persian poison could not be given to him, and that all that was said about it was a fable.

To-morrow the Parliament will return to Paris, which will delight the Parisians as much as the departure of Law.

That old Maintenon has sent the Duc du Maine about to tell the members of the Royal Family that my son poisoned the Dauphin, the Dauphine, and the Duc de Berri.  The old woman has even done more she has hinted to the Duchess that she is not secure in her husband’s house, and that she should ask her brother for a counter-poison, as she herself was obliged to do during the latter days of the King’s life.

The old woman lives very retired.  No one can say that any imprudent expressions have escaped her.  This makes me believe that she has some plan in her head, but I cannot guess what it is.