This accident, which almost turned my head, sequestered me from anything for two months, during which I never left the house, scarcely left the sick-chamber, attended to nothing, and saw only a few relatives or indispensable friends.

When my wife began to be re-established, I asked M. le Duc d’Orleans for a lodging at the new chateau at Meudon.  He lent me the whole chateau; completely furnished.  We passed there the rest of this summer, and several other summers afterwards.  It is a charming place for rides or drives.  We counted upon seeing only our friends there, but the proximity to Paris overwhelmed us with people, so that all the new chateau was sometimes completely filled, without reckoning the people of passage.

I have little need to say anything more of Madame la Duchesse de Berry.  These pages have already painted her.  She was a strange mixture of pride and shamelessness.  Drunkenness, filthy conversation, debauchery of the vilest kind, and impiety, were her diversions, varied, as has been seen, by occasional religious fits.  Her indecency in everything, language, acts, behaviour, passed all bounds; and yet her pride was so sublime that she could not endure that people should dare to speak of her amid her depravity, so universal and so public; she had the hardihood to declare that nobody had the right to speak of persons of her rank, or blame their most notorious actions!

Yet she had by nature a superior intellect, and, when she wished, could be agreeable and amiable.  Her face was commanding, though somewhat spoiled at last by fat.  She had much eloquence, speaking with an ease and precision that charmed and overpowered.  What might she not have become, with the talents she possessed!  But her pride, her violent temper, her irreligion, and her falsehood, spoiled all, and made her what we have seen her.

CHAPTER XCIX

Law had established his Mississippi Company, and now began to do marvels with it.  A sort of language had been invented, to talk of this scheme, language which, however, I shall no more undertake to explain than the other finance operations.  Everybody was mad upon Mississippi Stock.  Immense fortunes were made, almost in a breath; Law, besieged in his house by eager applicants, saw people force open his door, enter by the windows from the garden, drop into his cabinet down the chimney!  People talked only of millions.

Law, who, as I have said, came to my house every Tuesday, between eleven and twelve, often pressed me to receive some shares for nothing, offering to manage them without any trouble to me, so that I must gain to the amount of several millions!  So many people had already gained enormously by their own exertions that it was not doubtful Law could gain for me even more rapidly.  But I never would lend myself to it.  Law addressed himself to Madame de Saint-Simon, whom he found as inflexible.  He would have much preferred to enrich me than many others; so as to attach me to him by interest, intimate as he saw me with the Regent.  He spoke to M. le Duc d’Orleans, even, so as to vanquish me by his authority.  The Regent attacked me more than once, but I always eluded him.