e 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 daug