But I feared breaking the news, which might hurt the one I wanted to save, so I resolved to go straight to the Palais Royal. I ordered my carriage, simmering with impatience, and I threw myself into it like a man who is taking leave of his senses. I had often said to M. the Duc d’Orléans that I was not a man to importune him with my advice, but that when I had any, if I dared say, to give him, he should believe it was urgent, so I asked him to do me the good favor of receiving me right away since I had never been of a humor to wait quietly in the anteroom. His chief valets could have saved me that trouble, in any case, because of the knowledge I had of the whole inner workings of his court.
But that day he had me come in as soon as my carriage had pulled up in the inmost courtyard of the Palais Royal, which was always full of those to whom entrance should have been forbidden, since, by a shameful prostitution of all dignities and by the deplorable weakness of the Regent, those who were of the lowest quality, who did not even fear making their way up in long coats, could penetrate the court just as easily as dukes and almost on the same standing. Those are matters one might treat as being of no consequence, but to which men of the previous reign would not have given credence, who, fortunately for them, had died promptly enough not to witness such things.
Immediately ushered into the presence of the Regent whom I found without a single one of his surgeons or other domestics, and after I had greeted him with a very perfunctory bow that was returned me in exactly the same way: “Well, what is it now?” he asked awkwardly, as if humoring me. “Since you order me to speak, Monsieur,” I said heatedly, keeping my gaze fixed on his own, which could not sustain it, “it is only that you are in the process of losing in the eyes of everyone the little esteem and consideration”—those were the very words I used—“that most of society has kept for you.”
And, sensing him deeply wounded (because of which, despite what I knew of his insouciance, I conceived some hope), without pausing, so as to unburden myself once and for all of the unfortunate medicine I had to make him swallow, and so as not to give him time to interrupt me, I represented to him with the most frightful detail with what abandon he lived at the court, and how advanced this neglect—the right word had to be said, this contempt—had become in a few years; how these would be increased by the intrigues that would not fail to use the so-called inventions of Le Moine to cast wicked accusations against the Duc d’Orléans himself that might be absurd, but dangerous down to the last point; I reminded him—and I still tremble sometimes, at night when I wake up, when I think of the boldness I had in using these very words—that he had been accused many times of poisoning the princes who barred his way to the throne; that this great pile of gemstones they would have accepted as real would help him more easily attain the throne of Spain, for which reason no one doubted there was an entente between him, the Viennese court, the Emperor, and Rome; that because of the detestable authority of Rome he rejected Mme d’Orléans, and that it was a blessing from Providence for him that her recent confinements were fortunate, since otherwise the wicked rumors of poisoning would have been renewed; that to tell the truth, for desiring the death of Madame his wife, he was not like his brother guilty of Italian taste—these were my very terms—but that it was the only vice of which he was not accused (along with not having clean hands), since his relations with Mme la Duchesse de Berry seemed to many not to be those of a father; that if he had not inherited the abominable taste of Monsieur for all the rest, he was indeed his son from the habit of the perfumes that had put him out of favor with the king who could not bear them, and later on had favored the frightful rumors of having made an attempt on the Dauphine’s life, and by having always put into practice the detestable maxim of dividing to conquer with the help of repeating rumors from one person to another which were the plague of his court, as they had been that of Monsieur, his father, where they had prevented a unified reign: that he had preserved for Monsieur’s favorites a consideration that he did not grant to another, and that it was they—I did not force myself to name Effiat—who, aided by Mirepoix and La Mouchi, had cleared the way for Le Moine; that having as his only shield only men who no longer counted for anything after the death of Monsieur and who during his life had only amounted to anything because of the horrid conviction everyone had, even the king who had thus arranged to marry Mme d’Orléans, that one could obtain anything from them by means of money, and from him by those in whose clutches he was, no one feared attacking him by the most odious, the most intimate calumny, that it was high time, if indeed there still was time, for him finally to recover his grandeur and there was only one way to do that: to take measures in the greatest secrecy to have Le Moine arrested and, as soon as the thing was decided, not to delay the execution of it, and not to let him ever return to France.
M. the Duc d’Orléans, who had merely exclaimed once or twice at the beginning of this speech, had afterwards kept the silence of a man devastated by such a great blow; but my last words finally made a few of his own come out of his mouth. He was not spiteful, and resolution was not his strong point:
“What, then!” he said to me in a complaining tone, “Arrest him? But what if his invention happens to be real?”
“What’s this, Monsieur,” I replied, utterly surprised at such an extreme and pernicious blindness, “how can you think that, and so soon after having been disabused about the writing of the false Marquis de Ruffec? But really, if you have even one doubt, call for the man who knows more than anyone else in France about chemistry and all the sciences, as has been recognized by the academies and by astronomers; his character and birth, and the stainless life that has accompanied him, are your guarantee of his word.” He understood that I was talking about the Duc de Guiche, and with the joy of a man entangled in conflicting choices, from whom another man has removed the anxiety of having to make the right one:
“Excellent! We both had the same idea,” he said. “Guiche will decide, but I cannot see him today. You know that the King of England, traveling quite incognito under the name of the Earl of Stanhope, is coming tomorrow to talk with the King about matters in Holland and Germany; I’m giving him a party at Saint-Cloud, to which Guiche is invited. You will speak to him and me both, after dinner. But are you sure he’ll come?” he added in an embarrassed way.
I understood that he didn’t dare summon the Duc de Guiche to the Palais Royal, where, as you may imagine from the kind of people that M. the Duc d’Orléans saw, with whom Guiche was not at all acquainted, aside from Besons and me, he came as seldom as he could, knowing that it was the libertines who ranked first there rather than men like himself. Also the Regent, always fearing the duke would shower him with reproaches, lived in constant suspicion and reserve towards him.
Very careful to give everyone his due and not being unaware of what was due the true son of Monsieur, Guiche visited him only on special occasions, and I do not think anyone had seen him at the Palais Royal since he had come to pay him his respects upon the death of Monsieur, and the pregnancy of Mme d’Orléans. Even then he stayed only a short while, with indeed an air of respect, but as one who knew how to show with discernment that he was addressing, not the person, but the rank of a first prince of the blood. M. the Duc d’Orléans sensed this and did not fail to be affected by so bitter and cutting a treatment.
As I was leaving the Palais Royal, deeply sorry to see a
