The whole of the Parliament was influenced against him.  He made a remonstrance against this, which was certainly effected at the instigation of the eldest bastard and his wife.—­[The Duc and Duchesse du Maine.]—­If any one spoke ill of my son, and seemed dissatisfied, the Duchesse du Maine:  invited them to Sceaux, and pitied and caressed them to hear them abuse my son.  I wondered at his patience.  He has great courage, and went steadily on without disturbing himself about anything.  Although the Parliament of Paris sent to all the other parliaments in the kingdom to solicit them to unite with it, none of them did so, but all remained faithful to my son.  The libels which were dispersed for the purpose of exciting the people against him had scarcely any effect.  I believe the plot would have succeeded better if the bastard and his wife had not engaged in it, for they were extraordinarily hated at Paris.  My son told the Parliament they had nothing to do with the coinage; that he would maintain the royal authority, and deliver it to the King when he should be of age in the same state as he had found it on his becoming Regent.

The Marechale d’Uxelles hated my son mortally;, but after the King’s death he played the fawning dog so completely that my son forgave him and took him into favour again.  In the latter affair he was disposed once more to follow his natural inclination, but my son, having little value for whatever he could do, said, “Well, if he will not sign he may let it alone.”

When the Marshal saw my son was serious and did not care at all for his bravadoes, he became submissive and did what my son desired.

The wife of the cripple, the Duchesse du Maine, resolved to have an explanation with my son.  She made a sententious speech, just as if she had been on the stage; she asked how he could think that the answer to Fitz-Morris’s book should have proceeded from her, or that a Princess of the blood would degrade herself by composing libels?  She told him, too, that the Cardinal de Polignac was engaged in affairs of too much importance to busy himself in trifles like this, and M. de Malezieux was too much a philosopher to think of anything but the sciences.  For her own part, she said she had sufficient employment in educating her children as became that royal dignity of which she had been wrongfully deprived.  My son only replied to her thus:—­

“I have reason to believe that these libels have been got up at your house, and by you, because that fact has been attested by persons who have been in your service, and who have seen them in progress; beyond this no one makes me believe or disbelieve anything.”

He made no reply to her last observation, and so she went away.  She afterwards boasted everywhere of the firmness with which she had spoken to my son.