did not preserve sufficient energy to give up the sort of life which had
ruined him. For a long while the physicians had been threatening him
with sudden death. "It is all I can desire," said he. Naturally brave,
intelligent, amiable, endowed with a charm of manner which recalled Henry
IV., kind and merciful like him, of a mind that was inquiring, fertile,
capable of applying itself to details of affairs, Philip of Orleans was
dragged down by depravity of morals to the same in soul and mind; his
judgment, naturally straightforward and correct, could still discern
between good and evil, but he was incapable of energetically willing the
one and firmly resisting the other; he had governed equitably, without
violence and without harshness, he had attempted new and daring courses,
and he had managed to abandon them without any excesses or severities;
like Dubois, he had inspired France with a contempt which unfortunately
did not protect her from contagion. When Madame died, an inscription had
been put on the tomb of that honest, rude, and haughty German: "Here lies
Lazybones" (_Ci-git l'oisivete_). All the vices thus imputed to the
Regent did not perish with him, when he succumbed at forty-nine years of
age under their fatal effects. "The evil that men do lives after them,
the good is oft interred with their bones;" the Regency was the signal
for an irregularity of morals which went on increasing, like a filthy
river, up to the end of the reign of Louis XV.; the fatal seed had been
germinating for a long time past under the forced and frequently
hypocritical decency of the old court; it burst out under the easy-going
regency of an indolent and indulgent prince, himself wholly given to the
licentiousness which he excused and authorized by his own example. From
the court the evil soon spread to the nation; religious faith still
struggled within the soul, but it had for a long while been tossed about
between contrary and violent opinions; it found itself disturbed,
attacked, by the new and daring ideas which were beginning to dawn in
politics as well as in philosophy. The break-up was already becoming
manifest, though nobody could account for it, though no fixed plan was
conceived in men's minds. People devoured the memoirs of Cardinal Retz
and Madame de Motteville, which had just appeared; people formed from
them their judgments upon the great persons and great events which they
had seen and depicted. The University of