against the bastards, proposed that at the Bed of justice the education of the young King should be taken out of the control of M. du Maine and placed in his hands.  He proposed also that the title of Prince of the Blood should be taken from him, with all the privileges it conferred, and that he should be reduced to the rank of a simple Duke and Peer, taking his place among the rest according to the date of his erection; thus, at a bound, going down to the bottom of the peerage!

Should these memoirs ever see the light, every one who reads them will be able to judge how such a proposition as this harmonised with my personal wishes.  I had seen the bastards grow in rank and importance with an indignation and disgust I could scarcely contain.  I had seen favour after favour heaped upon them by the late King, until he crowned all by elevating them to the rank of Princes of the Blood in defiance of all law, of all precedent, of all decency, if I must say the word.  What I felt at this accumulation of honours I have more than once expressed; what I did to oppose such monstrous innovations has also been said.  No man could be more against M. du Maine than I, and yet I opposed this proposition of M. le Duc because I thought one blow was enough at a time, and that it might be dangerous to attempt the two at once.  M. du Maine had supporters, nay; he was at the head of a sort of party; strip him of the important post he held, and what might not his rake, his disappointment, and his wounded ambition lead him to attempt?  Civil war, perhaps, would be the result of his disgrace.

Again and again I urged these views, not only upon M. le Duc d’Orleans, but upon M. le Duc.  Nay, with this latter I had two long stolen interviews in the Tuileries Gardens, where we spoke without constraint, and exhausted all our arguments.  But M. le Duc was not to be shaken, and as I could do no more than I had done to move him, I was obliged at last to give in.  It was resolved, however, that disgrace should fall upon M. du Maine alone; that his brother, the Comte de Toulouse, an account of the devotion to the State he had ever exhibited, and his excellent conduct since the death of the late King, should, when stripped of his title like the other, receive it back again the moment after, in acknowledgment of the services he had rendered to the Regent as Councillor of State, and as an expression of personal good feeling towards him, which his excellent qualities so justly merited.

I returned home from my last interview with M. le Duc, and went to mass at the Jacobins, to which I entered from my garden.  It was not without a distracted mind.  But I prayed to God sincerely and earnestly to guide my steps, so that I might labour for His glory and the good of the State without private ends.  My prayer was heard, and in the sequel I had nothing to reproach myself with.  I followed the straight road without turning to the right or to the left.