The Duc’s laggard courage was spurred to fight more than one duel for his wife’s tarnished fame.  Of one of these sorry combats, Maurepas writes, “Her conduct with her father became so notorious that His Grace the Duc de Berry, disgusted at the scandal, forced the Duc d’Orleans to fight a duel on the terrace at Marly.  They were, however, soon separated, and the whole affair was hushed up.”

But release from such an intolerable life was soon coming to the ill-used Duc.  One day, when hunting, he was thrown from his horse, and ruptured a blood-vessel.  Fearful of alarming the King, now near the end of his long life, he foolishly made light of his accident, and only consented to see a doctor when it was too late.  When the doctors were at last summoned he was a dying man, his body drained of blood, which was later found in bowls concealed in various parts of his bedroom.  With his last breath, he said to his confessor, “Ah, reverend father, I alone am the real cause of my death.”

Thus, one May day in 1714, the Duchesse found herself a widow, within four years of her wedding-day; and the last frail barrier was removed from the path of self-indulgence and low passions to which her life was dedicated.  When, with the aged King’s death in the following year, her father became Regent of France, her position as daughter of the virtual sovereign was now more splendid than ever; and before she had worn her widow’s weeds a month, she had plunged again, still deeper, into dissipation, with Madame de Mouchy, one of her waiting-women, as chief minister to her pleasures.

It was at this time, before her husband had been many weeks in his grave, that the Comte de Riom, the last and most ill-favoured of her many lovers, came on the scene.  Nothing but a perverted taste could surely have seen any attraction in such a lover as this grand-nephew of the Duc de Lauzun, of whom the austere and disapproving Palatine Duchess draws the following picture:  “He has neither figure nor good-looks.  He is more like an ogre than a man, with his face of greenish yellow.  He has the nose, eyes, and mouth of a Chinaman; he looks, in fact, more like a baboon than the Gascon he really is.  Conceited and stupid, his large head seems to sit on his broad shoulders, owing to the shortness of his neck.  He is shortsighted and altogether is preternaturally ugly; and he appears so ill that he might be suffering from some loathsome disease.”

To this unflattering description, Saint-Simon adds the fact that his “large, pasty face was so covered by pimples that it looked like one large abscess.’” Such, then, was the repulsive lover who found favour in the eyes of the Regent’s daughter, and for whom she was ready to discard all her legion of more attractive wooers.