the indulgence which virtue testifies for youth’s follies.  The Comte d’Artois took him as the constant companion of his pleasures.  The queen, who liked the Comte d’Artois, feared for him the contagion of the disorders and amours of the Duc d’Orleans.  She hated equally in this young prince the favourite of the people of Paris and the corrupter of the Comte d’Artois.  She made the king purchase the almost royal palace of St. Cloud, the favourite seat of the Duc d’Orleans.  Infamous insinuations against him were incessantly transpiring from the half confidences of courtiers.  He was accused of having induced courtezans to poison the blood of the Prince de Lamballe, his brother-in-law, and of having enervated him in debauches, in order that he might be the sole heir of the immense property of the house of Penthievre.  This crime was the pure invention of malice.

Thus persecuted by the animosity of the court, the Duc d’Orleans was more and more driven to retirement.  In his frequent visits to England he formed a close intimacy with the Prince of Wales, heir to the throne, who took for his friends all the enemies of his father; playing with sedition, dishonoured by debts, of scandalous life, prolonging beyond the usual term those excesses of princes—­horses, pleasure of the table, gaming, women; abetting the intrigues of Fox, Sheridan and Burke, and prefacing his advent to royal power by all the audacity of a refractory son and a factious citizen.

The Duc d’Orleans thus tasted of the joys of liberty in a London life.  He brought back to France habits of insolence against the court, a taste for popular disturbances, contempt for his own rank, familiarity with the multitude, a citizen’s life in a palace, and that simple style of dress, which by abandoning the uniform of the French nobility, and blending attire generally, soon destroyed all inequalities of costume amongst citizens.

Then given up entirely to the exclusive care of repairing his impaired fortune, the Duc d’Orleans constructed the Palais Royal.  He changed the noble and spacious gardens of his palace into a market of luxury, devoted by day to traffic, and by night to play and debauchery—­a complete sink of iniquities, built in the heart of the capital—­a work of cupidity which antique manners never could forgive this prince; and which, being gradually adopted like the forum by the indolence of the Parisian population, was destined to become the cradle of the Revolution.  This Revolution was striding onwards.  The prince awaited it in supineness, as if liberty of the world had been but one more mistress.