There were other persons, not to tire you with farther particulars upon this head, of credit and influence with whom I found indirect and private ways of conversing; but it was in vain to expect any more than civil language from them in a case which they found no disposition in their Master to countenance, and in favour of which they had no prejudices of their own.  The private engagements into which the Duke of Orleans had entered with his Majesty during the life of the late King will abate of their force as the Regent grows into strength, and would soon have had no force at all if the Pretender had met with success:  but in these beginnings they operated very strongly.  The air of this Court was to take the counterpart of all which had been thought right under Louis XIV.  “Cela resemble trop a l’ancien systeme” was an answer so often given that it became a jest and almost a proverb.  But to finish this account with a fact which is incredible, but strictly true; the very peace which had saved France from ruin, and the makers of it, were become as unpopular at this Court as at the Court of Vienna.

The Duke of Ormond flattered himself, in this state of things, that he had opened a private and sure channel of arriving at the Regent, and of bending him to his purposes.  His Grace and I lived together at this time in an house which one of my friends had lent me.  I observed that he was frequently lost, and that he made continual excursions out of town, with all the mysterious precaution imaginable.  I doubted at first whether those intrigues related to business or pleasure.  I soon discovered with whom they were carried on, and had reason to believe that both were mingled in them.  It is necessary that I explain this secret to you.

Mrs. Trant, whom I have named above, had been preparing herself for the retired abstemious life of a Carmelite by taking a surfeit of the pleasures of Paris, when, a little before the death of the Queen, or about that time, she went into England.  What she was entrusted either by the Chevalier, or any other person, to negotiate there, I am ignorant of; and it imports not much to know.  In that journey she made or renewed an acquaintance with the Duke of Ormond.  The scandalous chronicle affirms that she brought with her, when she returned into France, a woman of whom I have not the least knowledge, but who was probably handsome, since without beauty such a merchandise would not have been saleable, nor have answered the design of the importer; and that she made this way her court to the Regent.  Whatever her merit was, she kept a correspondence with him, and put herself upon that foot of familiarity which he permits all those who contribute to his pleasures to assume.  She was placed by him, as she told me herself, where I found her some time after that which I am speaking of, in the house of an ancient gentlewoman who had formerly been Maid of Honour to Madame, and who had contracted at Court a spirit of intrigue which accompanied her in her retreat.