I never knew who had served me this ill-turn with Monseigneur, but I always suspected Mademoiselle de Lillebonne.  After a long time, having obtained with difficulty the consent of the timid Du Mont, I made Madame de Saint-Simon speak to the Duchesse de Bourgogne, who undertook to arrange the affair as well as it could be arranged.  The Duchesse spoke indeed to Monseigneur, and showed him how ridiculously he had been deceived, when he was persuaded that I could ever have entertained the ideas attributed to me.  Monseigneur admitted that he had been carried away by anger; and that there was no likelihood that I should have thought of anything so wicked and incredible.

About this time the household of the Duc and Duchesse de Berry was constituted.  Racilly obtained the splendid appointment of first surgeon, and was worthy of it; but the Duchesse de Berry wept bitterly, because she did not consider him of high family enough.  She was not so delicate about La Haye, whose appointment she rapidly secured.  The fellow looked in the glass more complaisantly than ever.  He was well made, but stiff, and with a face not at all handsome, and looking as if it had been skinned.  He was happy in more ways than one, and was far more attached to his new mistress than to his master.  The King was very angry when he learned that the Duc de Berry had supplied himself with such an assistant.

Meantime, I continued on very uneasy terms with Monseigneur, since I had learned his strange credulity with respect to me.  I began to feel my position very irksome, not to say painful, on this account.  Meudon I would not go to—­for me it was a place infested with demons—­yet by stopping away I ran great risks of losing the favour and consideration I enjoyed at Court.  Monseigneur was a man so easily imposed upon, as I had already experienced, and his intimate friends were so unscrupulous that there was no saying what might be invented on the one side and swallowed on the other, to my discredit.  Those friends, too, were, I knew, enraged against me for divers weighty reasons, and would stop at nothing, I was satisfied, to procure my downfall.  For want of better support I sustained myself with courage.  I said to myself, “We never experience all the evil or all the good that we have apparently the most reason to expect.”  I hoped, therefore, against hope, terribly troubled it must be confessed on the score of Meudon.  At Easter, this year, I went away to La Ferme, far from the Court and the world, to solace myself as I could; but this thorn in my side was cruelly sharp!  At the moment the most unlooked-for it pleased God to deliver me from it.

At La Ferme I had but few guests:  M. de Saint-Louis, an old brigadier of cavalry, and a Normandy gentleman, who had been in my regiment, and who was much attached to me.  On Saturday, the 11th of the month, and the day before Quasimodo, I had been walking with them all the morning, and I had entered all-alone into my cabinet a little before dinner, when a courier sent by Madame de Saint-Simon, gave me a letter from her, in which I was informed that Monseigneur was ill!