CHAPTER XXI
Origin of the liaison between Monsieur le Duc and Madame de Prie considered—Extraordinary ascendency which the latter acquires over her lover—For a while, the favourite leads a life of pleasure, but is soon obliged to give her attention to politics—Exasperation of Madame de Pléneuf’s coterie against her—Insecurity of Monsieur le Duc’s position—The Orléans faction—Intrigues of the War Minister Le Blanc and the Belle-Isles—Hatred of Madame de Prie for Le Blanc—She resolves to crush the common enemies of herself and Monsieur le Duc—Her skilful conduct—Murder of Sandrier de Mitry, chief cashier of La Jonchère, treasurer of the Emergency War Fund—Sinister suspicions concerning La Jonchère and Le Blanc—Madame de Prie determines to get to the bottom of the mystery—Her alliance with the Pâris brothers against the War Minister—Dubois persuades the Regent to withdraw his protection from Le Blanc—Arrest of La Jonchère and examination of his accounts—Disgrace and exile of Le Blanc—The death of Dubois puts a stop to the proceedings—Death of Philippe d’Orléans—Monsieur le Duc becomes Prime Minister.
One night, in the autumn of 1719, so the story goes, the Duc de Bourbon attended a ball at the Opera, where his attention was attracted by two masked ladies, who remained inseparable throughout the evening. One of them in particular piqued his curiosity, as much as by her liveliness and wit, as by the perfection of her shape and the grace of her movements. He entreated her to unmask, but was met by a refusal, and she and her companion took their departure, laughing merrily at his mortification. At the next Opera-ball, the two ladies appeared in the same costume. Monsieur le Duc, who was again present, hastened to join them, but, though, on this occasion, he succeeded in ascertaining that the elder was a Madame Auxy, he was unable to discover the identity of the one who most interested him, for nothing could persuade her to unmask. On leaving him, however, she hinted that, if he cared to attend the next ball, he might find her less obdurate.
The prince was faithful to the rendezvous, but the fair inconnue seemed disinclined to fulfil her promise; and it was only after many refusals and many protestations that she at length consented to remove her mask, and to reveal the adorable features of Madame de Prie, at sight of which Monsieur le Duc incontinently succumbed.
Such is the version of the affair which has found favour with the majority of historians. It is doubtful, however, if it is the correct one, and, any way, it is strangely inconsistent with the account given by Caylus—no friend, by the way, of Madame de Prie—of the repulsion with which the first solicitations of Monsieur le Duc inspired the object of his desires:
“However ambitious Madame de Prie may have been, when she saw herself on the point of surrendering to a man whose face was extremely repulsive, although he was rather well-made, she experienced a frightful repugnance, and was a hundred times ready to renounce her project.”
A more plausible explanation of the origin of this passion, which, owing to its consequences, belongs to history, is that Madame de Prie’s aunt, Madame de Séchelles, who was on friendly terms with Marie Anne de Bourbon-Conti, the first wife of Monsieur le Duc, and a frequent visitor at the Hôtel de Condé, brought her niece there; that Monsieur le Duc saw her and fell desperately in love with her, and that certain partisans of the House of Condé, who were anxious to find some intelligent woman capable of guiding the prince amidst the bewildering chaos of passions and intrigues in which he found himself, and of awakening in him those ambitions which they themselves had vainly endeavoured to arouse, persuaded her, weary as she was of the trials and humiliations of poverty and eager once again to possess the good things of life, to become his mistress.
What, however, is incontestable, is the completeness of her triumph. From the first hour until the time, six years later, when circumstances over which neither of them had any control came to force them apart, she dominated Monsieur le Duc entirely, and he adored her with an intensity of devotion of which no one had believed him capable. The Sabrans, the Nesles, the Polignacs and the rest were as entirely forgotten as if they had never existed; never was there so much as a whisper of a rival in his affections. He consecrated himself to her body and soul.
Nor is this a matter for surprise, since Madame de Prie was no ordinary mistress. Not only did she possess in a superlative degree all that could charm the senses, but she had intelligence, culture, and exquisite tact, and, she understood to perfection the art of pleasing. “She amused him, she distracted him, she showed a profound respect for his decisions, which flattered him in confirming him in the idea that he acted always on his own initiative. She never gave him advice except after being asked for it, and in subordinating it, in appearance, to the superior intelligence of her lover, although it was frequently her counsel which prevailed.”[257] Thus, she insinuated herself into the mind and heart of the prince and “disposed of him as a slave.”[258] Never did he dream of rebelling against his fetters, since he was barely conscious of them.
For a while, Madame de Prie gave herself up to the enjoyment of all the luxury and splendour with which her princely lover hastened to surround her with the zest which only a pretty young woman can feel who, after once being in a position to indulge all her caprices, has for several years been compelled to deny herself even the necessaries—or what the feminine mind considers the necessaries—of existence. She passed long delightful hours in the shops of fashionable couturiers and made extensive purchases, which, let us hope, Monsieur le Duc paid for in hard cash, and not in the notes of his protégé Law’s unfortunate bank. She visited the ateliers of the artists, of whom she had in former days been a generous patron, and commissioned a portrait of herself from Van Loo, and another from Rosalba, whom she had patronised at Turin, and who had just completed a pastel of Madame de Parabère. Arrayed in ravishing toilettes and blazing with diamonds, she did the honours of the Hôtel de Condé, of Chantilly and of Saint-Maur, for, very opportunely for her, the unloved wife of Monsieur le Duc had, after a long and painful illness, recently departed to another world, leaving the field quite free for the sultana. And she profoundly troubled the salons by launching an entirely novel method of arranging the hair, which became her à merveille, but caused serious inconvenience to some of the fashionable dames who felt constrained to adopt it.
But, after some weeks, she was obliged to give her mind to more serious matters. The “elevation” of a petite bourgeoise, daughter of a fraudulent financier and of a woman universally despised, to be the favourite of a prince who stood so near the throne and might even one day ascend it, had not taken place without exciting the most rancorous jealousy and hatred. Chansons, venomous satires, slanders, calumnies, rained upon her, until, if she had been a more sensitive woman, she might well have been driven to the verge of despair. She was charged with having led a life of debauchery from her earliest youth; of having bewitched Monsieur le Duc by initiating him into vices imported by her from Italy and hitherto unknown in France; of having ruined her husband by her scandalous extravagance; of having treated an unselfish and devoted mother with the most outrageous cruelty and ingratitude. She learned that in Madame de Pléneuf’s circle it was predicted that her triumph would be of very brief duration; that they would soon succeed in disgusting Monsieur le Duc with his choice, and that when she had fallen from her high estate and had been abandoned by the prince, they would make her bitterly repent of her victory.
She learned, too, that the position of Monsieur le Duc was far from secure, and that he had many powerful enemies, who were continually intriguing against him and who would not scruple to employ every possible means to reduce him to political impotence. This, however, requires a word of explanation.
For some years past the bitterest antipathy had existed between the Houses of Orléans and Condé. This feud had its origin in the aversion which the two daughters of Louis XIV. and Madame de Montespan had always entertained for each other, and which, in their younger days, had so much disturbed the harmony of the royal circle that the King was at length obliged to threaten them with banishment from the Court if they could not live peaceably together. The hatred between the two sisters had been communicated to their sons, the Duc de Chartres and Monsieur le Duc, and intensified by the lawsuit over the will of the late Monsieur le Prince and by the prominence taken by Monsieur le Duc in the campaign against the legitimated princes, whose cause the Duchesse d’Orléans had espoused with the most passionate enthusiasm.
The Regent did not share the antipathy of his wife and son to the Condés; indeed, he regarded the proceedings of them and the faction which they had gathered about them with the gravest suspicion, which is hardly surprising, having regard to the ambitions with which they were generally credited. These included his own deposition and the substitution of the Duchesse d’Orléans as Regent, the banishment of Monsieur le Duc and the Condés, the re-establishment of the legitimated princes in their titles and dignities, the constitution of a new Ministry, and a rapprochement with Spain.
The party was numerically powerful, including as it did a number of the protégés of the House of Orléans, and many discontented and ambitious persons. It also comprised some very distinguished names: the Duc and Duchesse du Maine, the Comte de Toulouse, the Prince de Condé, the Rohans, the Duc de Montemart, and the Maréchaux de Villeroy, Berwick and Tallard. But its most active and formidable members were three men of middle-class origin: the Secretary of State for War, Le Blanc, the Comte, afterwards the Maréchal de Belle-Isle, and his younger brother, the Chevalier de Belle-Isle.
LOUIS HENRI, DUC DE BOURBON, PRINCE DE CONDÉ (CALLED MONSIEUR LE DUC)
FROM AN ENGRAVING BY P. DREVET, AFTER THE PAINTING BY GOBERT
Claude Le Blanc was the son of Louis Le Blanc, who had been at one time intendant of Normandy; his mother was a sister of the Maréchal de Bezons. Born in 1669, he practised for some years at the Bar, but in 1704 was appointed intendant of Auvergne. He was an exceedingly able man, “full of intelligence, capacity and resource,”[259] and in the intendancy of Flanders, to which he was transferred towards the close of the War of the Austrian Succession, he rendered such admirable service that Louis XIV. summoned him to Court in order that he might thank him personally.
On the old King’s death, the functions of Secretary of State for War were suppressed and replaced by a council, of which Le Blanc was a member, but, after trying this experiment for two years, the Regent decided to revert to the old order of things, and the office was conferred upon the ex-intendant.
Although Le Blanc possessed few of the qualities of a Louvois, and during the war with Spain which followed the Cellamare conspiracy was guilty of more than one grave error, he was, on the whole, far from an incapable Minister, and the Army owed to him several useful reforms, while he always enjoyed great popularity with the troops. But, on the other hand, he was greedy, ambitious, unscrupulous, and an incorrigible intriguer, with whom no consideration of gratitude or honour would be permitted to weigh for a moment.
In the Comte de Belle-Isle, who, a quarter of a century later, during the War of the Austrian Succession, was to earn undying renown by his gallant defence of Prague and the masterly manner in which he subsequently conducted the retreat of the garrison to Eger, through the midst of an enemy’s country and in the depth of winter, he possessed a most valuable ally.
Although Belle-Isle was the grandson of the Surintendant Fouquet, whose ill-gotten wealth had brought upon him so terrible a punishment, he had, nevertheless, entered the service of Louis XIV. and risen to the rank of brigadier-general. He accompanied Villars to the negotiations of Rastadt, and, after the conclusion of peace, was made governor of Huningue. Appointed maréchal de camp on the outbreak of the war between France and Spain, he contributed to the capture of Fontarabia and San Sebastian, and, without having done anything very notable, contrived, thanks to the adroit manner in which his friend Le Blanc represented his services, to acquire a considerable military reputation and with it a footing at the Court, of which he did not fail to profit. Ambitious, enterprising, and persuasive, he succeeded in insinuating himself into the favour of the Regent, and soon began to be regarded as a very important personage.
The third member of the triumvirate, the Chevalier de Belle-Isle, was a young man of twenty-seven, noted for his dashing valour in the field and his innumerable gallantries. His abilities were, however, considerable, and his ambition perhaps even more excessive than that of his elder brother, whose entire confidence he enjoyed.
Le Blanc and the Belle-Isles, while secretly the protagonists of the opposition party, remained, in appearance, devoted adherents of Philippe d’Orléans, and this made them doubly dangerous. Profiting by the confidence which the Regent reposed in them, they had lately attempted a master-stroke, by imputing to the Duc de Bourbon machinations of their own cabal which were on the point of being discovered. They accused him of conspiring to supplant the Regent, and so cleverly did they manufacture evidence in support of this charge that Monsieur le Duc had all the difficulty imaginable to prove his innocence. Eventually, the Duc d’Orléans accepted his indignant protestations, but from that moment the chief of the House of Condé began to be regarded by the public as a possible rival of his Royal Highness.
Now, by a singular coincidence, the same three men who had so nearly succeeded in bringing about the disgrace of Monsieur le Duc were the most devoted of all the friends of Madame de Pléneuf, and, in consequence, implacable enemies of Madame de Prie. Le Blanc had rendered himself particularly odious to the Duc de Bourbon’s mistress. For some years past the Minister had been completely infatuated with Madame de Pléneuf and obedient to her slightest behest, and in the miserable days which had followed the discovery of Agnès’s flirtation with M. d’Angennes he had ably seconded her mother in making the girl’s life a burden to her. Moreover, whether justly or no, she strongly suspected him and the Belle-Isles of having been concerned in the tragic end of the unfortunate d’Angennes, who, shortly after the episode in question, had been found dead in the street, pierced by three sword-thrusts, in circumstances which pointed to his being the victim of some private vengeance. Again, Le Blanc had, at his own special request, been appointed a member of the commission appointed to investigate the accounts of M. de Pléneuf and his fellow-commissaries; and the animus he had displayed against the principal delinquent on this occasion—which, it was generally believed, had been prompted by the desire to please Madame de Pléneuf, who had been for some years past on very bad terms with her husband, and, at the same time, to obtain greater facilities for enjoying that lady’s society—had largely contributed to his ruin.
And, finally, he had committed an action which would alone have sufficed to assure him the undying hatred of Madame de Prie.
We have mentioned that among the admirers of Madame de Prie at Turin was the Marquis d’Alincourt, son of the Maréchal de Villeroy. Whether there had ever been anything serious between them is very doubtful, but, at any rate, the lady had been indiscreet enough to write d’Alincourt several letters which were capable of such an interpretation. Now, Le Blanc, who was a friend of d’Alincourt, knew of the existence of these epistles, and, soon after Madame de Prie became the mistress of Monsieur le Duc, he contrived, by some means, to get possession of them, and handed them to Madame de Pléneuf, who carried them straight to her daughter’s lover. The precious pair doubtless hoped thereby to bring about a rupture between the prince and his inamorata, but they had sadly underrated the strength of the former’s infatuation; and the only result was to disgust him with persons who could make war with such weapons and to intensify the hatred with which Madame de Prie regarded her mother and the Minister for War.
As soon as Madame de Prie understood the precarious situation of Monsieur le Duc, and that her mother’s friends, Le Blanc and the Belle-Isles, were his most redoubtable enemies, she recognized that her interests were one with those of her lover, and that, by placing him in a position in which he would be able to defy them, she would shelter herself from their blows. From that moment, the line of action which it behoved her to follow was clear, and she determined to devote all her talents and all her energies to rallying the prince’s partisans around him and thwarting the machinations of their common foes. Nor did she intend to rest from her labours until she had crushed them utterly, and raised Monsieur le Duc so high that they would be powerless to injure either him or herself.
But, to accomplish this, it was necessary to begin by freeing herself from certain embarrassments: by appeasing her husband’s indignation and preventing a scandal, which might prejudice her in the eyes of those old-fashioned persons who consented to condone immorality only so long as the conventionalities were duly observed; by rehabilitating her father, whose delinquencies were a continual reproach to her; and by persuading the Condés, and, in particular, the Dowager-Duchesse de Bourbon to accept the situation and admit her to their intimacy.
All these matters were satisfactorily arranged. M. de Prie, who, at the beginning of 1720, had resigned his post at Turin, returned to Paris vowing vengeance against his erring wife, and, if gossip is to be believed, did actually go so far as to give her several blows with his cane. But he was a man of feeble character, and, besides, desperately in need of money; and soon, perceiving in which direction his interests lay, he calmed down, and eventually took himself off to Languedoc, with the title of lieutenant-general of that province, which Monsieur le Duc had been instrumental in obtaining for him.
Thanks to the same influence, the Government consented to throw a veil over the misdeeds of M. de Pléneuf, and to permit him to return to Paris, though it refused to restore him his property. His daughter, however, hastened to provide for his necessities, and soon afterwards secured for him the post of secretary to Sennecterre, who had been despatched to England to discuss with the British Government the question of the restoration of Gibraltar to Spain.
The question of her relations with the Condé family presented some difficulty. The Duc de Bourbon’s two brothers, the Comte de Charolais and the Comte de Clermont, were disposed to be friendly enough. With the elder, indeed, she happened to be already on amicable terms, as some three years before, during a visit to Italy, he had stayed for a time at the French Embassy at Turin, and had been much pleased by the hospitality he had received while she had earned the gratitude of the Comte de Clermont by assisting him in a love-affair with a cousin of her own. But their sisters, with the exception of Mlle. de Clermont, were less inclined to complaisance, while it was plain that Madame la Duchesse looked upon Madame de Prie’s subjugation of her son with a very jaundiced eye. Madame la Duchesse had very little affection for the latter, but she aspired to control all his actions, and she strongly resented the appearance upon the scene of a rival influence. For some time she made no secret of her dislike of Madame de Prie, and treated her with the coldest disdain; and the favourite had need of all her suppleness to overcome her hostility. At length, however, the princess decided to accept the situation, and, though she continued to cherish for her son’s mistress a strong aversion, their relations were, to all appearances, perfectly cordial.
Next, the astute young woman proceeded to ingratiate herself with the Regent, Cardinal Dubois, and other members of the Government.
By Philippe d’Orléans she was, as we have seen, already very favourably regarded, and very soon she was admitted to the circle of his intimate friends.
Profiting by the knowledge that Dubois, although he had little liking for Monsieur le Duc, cared still less for the adversaries of the Condés, she sought eagerly for opportunities of rendering herself useful to him, and succeeded so well that before long she was able to reckon with confidence upon the support of his Eminence, who was becoming more powerful every day.
Nor did she neglect persons who, although they did not occupy any important ministerial office, were, nevertheless, possessed of influence. Thus, she succeeded in detaching, temporarily at least, the Cardinal de Rohan from the opposing faction—a distinct triumph, since the cardinal was generally believed to have been one of the lovers of Madame de Pléneuf—and in deciding the Maréchal de Villars, d’Alincourt, Livry, first maître d’hôtel to the King, her uncle by marriage the Maréchal de Matignon, the Duc de Richelieu, of gallant memory, for whom, when Monsieur le Duc became Prime Minister, she obtained the Embassy of Vienna, and several other nobles who had been hesitating between the two parties, to throw in their lot with the Condés.
She supported Law, too; and that adventurous financier was not ungrateful, and repaid her protection by filling her purse so full that she became quite independent of her lover’s bounty and was able to maintain a whole company of spies, who brought her early information of the movements of the enemy.
And so, shrewd, vigilant, resolute, and courageous, she pursued the path she had marked out for herself, to all appearance satisfied to remain on the defensive, but, in reality, carefully noting the weak points in her adversaries’ position, and watching for the occasion to deliver a crushing blow. Nor was the occasion long in presenting itself.
On 25 March, 1722, Sandrier de Mitry, receiver-general of the finances of French Flanders, and secretary and principal cashier to La Jonchère,[260] treasurer of the Emergency War Fund,[261] disappeared from his home, and nothing more was heard of him until the 18th of the following month, when his body, partially clothed and pierced by two wounds, was discovered in the Seine, near Marly.
This mysterious crime created an immense sensation in Paris, and a strong suspicion prevailed that La Jonchère, who did not bear too high a character,[262] had been plundering the State; that the unfortunate Sandrier had detected the defalcations, and that the treasurer had caused him to be made away with in order to close the matter.
But rumour, in certain quarters, went further than this, and accused the War Minister, Le Blanc, of being a party to the crime, or, at any rate, to what was believed to be the cause of it. For Le Blanc was not only La Jonchère’s official chief, but his patron and friend, and it would have been almost impossible for the treasurer to have falsified his accounts without the Minister being aware of it.
The authorities, however, declined to see the least connexion between the murder of Sandrier and the position which he had occupied, and nearly a year passed without any steps being taken against La Jonchère. It is, indeed, highly improbable that they would ever have been stirred to action had not Madame de Prie taken upon herself to intervene.
No sooner did that energetic lady hear of the crime that had been committed and of the rumours that were in circulation concerning La Jonchère and Le Blanc, than she resolved to employ every means in her power to get to the bottom of the affair. Fortune favoured her quest, in bringing her allies, wealthy, enterprising, and capable, and as determined to compass the ruin of the Minister for War as she was herself.
Quite apart from the Condé faction, Le Blanc possessed many enemies. Of these the most powerful were the four brothers Pâris, the famous bankers, who, after the Mississippi crash, had been entrusted by the Regent with the task of restoring the public credit. In the days before they had attained their present eminence, the Pâris had been in business as army-contractors, and Le Blanc, at that time Intendant of Flanders, had caused the third brother, Pâris-Le Montagne, to be arrested on a charge of rendering fraudulent accounts. More recently become Minister for War, he had accused the ablest of the four, Pâris-Duverney, of infringing the edicts forbidding the export of gold, and, though Duverney had succeeded in exculpating himself, both he and his brothers were provisionally banished from the realm. Hence, the bankers hated Le Blanc and had sworn to be avenged on him as soon as they were able.
The task of re-establishing the finances which had been entrusted to them, and which they conducted with undeniable skill, of course included an examination of the accounts of the public services. Scarcely had they begun to investigate those of the Ministry for War than they discovered such flagrant irregularities as to leave little room for doubt that a system of wholesale robbery prevailed. They immediately drew up a report to that effect and despatched it to the Regent, but, in their eagerness to bring their enemy to account, they had not waited to substantiate the charges they made; and Philippe d’Orléans, with whom Le Blanc was just then in high favour, excused himself from moving in the matter, on the ground that the Minister for War had rendered undoubted service to the State, and was extremely popular with the Army, and that, in the present critical condition of affairs, it would be better to watch his future conduct than to criticize his past acts.
The bankers were greatly mortified by this repulse. Nevertheless, they were too embittered against Le Blanc, and too apprehensive of reprisals on his part, to abandon the struggle; and they accordingly began to look about them for some powerful ally, whose assistance might enable them to resume it with some prospect of success.
Naturally, their thoughts turned in the direction of the Duc de Bourbon, but, since they had been the most strenuous opponents of his protégé Law, and they feared that the prince might harbour some resentment against them on that account, they hesitated to approach him. Great therefore was their satisfaction, when one day they received a letter from Madame de Prie proposing an alliance between them and the House of Condé against the common enemy.
The alliance was soon concluded, and, supported openly by the whole weight of the Condé influence, and encouraged in secret by Dubois, whose jealousy of Le Blanc Madame de Prie had artfully fanned, the Pâris brothers again advanced to the attack, and demanded that a commission should be appointed to investigate the accounts of the Ministry for War.
Their demand was conceded, the commissioners had been already nominated, and every one was expecting to hear that Le Blanc and La Jonchère had been summoned to appear before them, when the faction opposed to the Condés, with the Duc de Chartres, the Prince de Conti, and the legitimated princes at its head, started a violent agitation in favour of Le Blanc, and carried the war into the enemy’s camp by accusing the Pâris brothers of having themselves despoiled the State. This furnished the Regent with a pretext for intervening between the accused and justice, and the meeting of the commission was postponed sine die.
Madame de Prie, however, did not despair. She had made sure of the support of Dubois, who in August, 1722, had been named ministre principal—the same title which had been given the Cardinal de Richelieu—and her several agents were everywhere at work. Daily the evidence against Le Blanc was accumulating in her hands; towards the end of the spring of 1723, it was so overwhelming that she felt that it would be impossible for the Regent to ignore it.
She had ascertained that, apart from their official relations, Le Blanc and La Jonchère were on terms of the closest intimacy; that the latter had a pretty and coquettish wife, whom he had complacently surrendered to his chief, being himself in love with the wife of the unfortunate Sandrier; that he lived in almost princely style, and had, moreover, advanced large sums of money to the Comte de Belle-Isle, to defray the cost of a magnificent hôtel which he was building on the banks of the Seine, opposite the Tuileries; that, on learning of the death of Sandrier, Le Blanc had shown so much emotion that every one present was astonished, and that a day or two later he fell ill and was obliged to take to his bed. And finally, she discovered that it was practically certain that, in robbing the State, Le Blanc and La Jonchère had been acting with the connivance of the Palais-Royal, and that a considerable portion of the spoil had found its way into the Regent’s coffers.
When she judged that the moment for action had arrived, Madame de Prie communicated with Dubois, who, armed with the reports she had sent him, went to the Regent, laid them before him, and told him very plainly that he could no longer support Le Blanc without being immediately compromised.
Philippe d’Orléans, after a perusal of the documents, was obliged to acknowledge that the Minister was right, and authorized him to take what steps he considered advisable in the matter. Dubois lost no time in setting the Law in motion; the commission met at the house of the Maréchal de Villars, who had been appointed president; and on 24 May La Jonchère was arrested as he was returning from Versailles, in virtue of a lettre de cachet signed by the Cardinal, and conducted to the Bastille, while the seals were placed on his hôtel in the Rue Saint-Honoré, and all his registers and papers seized by the police. At the Bastille, La Jonchère was subjected to two long interrogatories by Ravot d’Ombreval, a relative of Dubois, who acted as attorney-general to the commission. He appeared very agitated, contradicted himself several times, and ended by admitting that he had acted dishonestly, and that he was not the only one guilty, though he obstinately refused to give the names of his accomplices.
A few days later, two of La Jonchère’s principal clerks were also arrested, and on 18 June the treasurer was conducted to his house to be present at the raising of the seals and the sorting of his papers. This operation lasted from eleven o’clock in the morning until nine in the evening, when he was escorted back to the Bastille, guarded by forty archers and followed by two carts filled with his registers and papers. The examination of these, which was carried out under the supervision of the Lieutenant of Police, d’Argenson, revealed immense defalcations, and, moreover, left no room for doubt as to the culpability of Le Blanc. It also showed that La Jonchère had received a great number of the discredited notes of Law’s Bank, for which he had presumably given in exchange gold to the amount of their face value.
On 1 July, Le Blanc received orders from the King to send him his resignation of the office of Secretary of State for War, and to retire immediately to the Château of Doué, belonging to his son-in-law, the Marquis de Traisnel. A few days later, he was replaced by the Marquis de Breteuil,[263] a devoted adherent of Monsieur le Duc and Madame de Prie. On the 16th, the commission, which was now established at the Arsenal, summoned the two Belle-Isles to appear before it, together with the Marquis de Conches and the Comte de Mayières, two lieutenant-generals attached to Le Blanc, and several other persons. The Belle-Isles adopted a haughty tone, and protested their innocence with such indignation that the commission were visibly impressed. However, the discovery of a note concealed behind the grate in La Jonchère’s bedroom, in the Rue Saint-Honoré, in which the elder brother acknowledged the receipt of 1,800,000 livres from the treasurer, put a different complexion upon the matter.
The utmost consternation now reigned among the Orléans faction, and it seemed as though Madame de Prie had succeeded in reducing the enemies of herself and her lover to complete impotence, when the death of Dubois, which occurred on 10 August, 1723, intervened to save them, or, at any rate, to procure them a respite of some months.
With the disappearance from the political scene of the ambitious cardinal, whose will had so long dominated his own, Philippe d’Orléans resumed his liberty of action. On the very day on which Dubois died, he demanded and obtained from the King the post of Prime Minister, cleverly forestalling Monsieur le Duc, who, on the advice of his mistress, had decided to ask for it himself; and thus united in his own person the titles of heir-presumptive to the Crown and Prime Minister.
The question as to which of the two parties the prince would incline greatly agitated the public mind, and it was the opinion of most that he would favour that of his wife and son. It is very probable that he would have done so, had Monsieur le Duc been so maladroit as to display any mortification at his having stolen a march upon him, in which case the work of so many months might have been undone in a few hours. But Madame de Prie was far too astute to permit her lover to commit a blunder of this kind; and, prompted by her, the Duc de Bourbon hastened to repair to the Palais-Royal, to present his compliments to the new Prime Minister and to assure him of his devotion to his person.
Thanks to this prudent conduct, although they were not allowed to follow up their victory, they retained possession of the greater part of the field. Le Blanc remained in exile, and his successor, Breteuil, who, as we have mentioned, was devoted to their cause, was confirmed in his office: La Jonchère remained under lock and key; while the Belle-Isles and their creatures, though they remained at liberty, were kept under observation. Finally—and this, we may be sure, was not the least satisfaction to Madame de Prie—her mother found herself neglected and reduced to poverty.
Such was the position of affairs when, on 2 December, 1723, the Duc d’Orléans was suddenly attacked by apoplexy at Versailles, and expired almost immediately, in the arms of his latest inamorata, Madame de Phalaris. Of all the princes, Monsieur le Duc happened to be the only one on the spot, and he did not fail to profit by his good fortune. Following the procedure adopted by the deceased prince on the day of Dubois’s death, he hastened to the King, informed him of the loss which he had just sustained, and, almost in the same breath, demanded the vacant post of Prime Minister. His youthful Majesty, “without being moved by the news,” conferred it upon him; the prince, in accordance with custom, forthwith took the oath and received the patent; and when, a few hours later, the Duc de Chartres, who had received the news of his father’s death at the Opera in Paris, or, according to another account, in the boudoir of an Opera-girl whose society he affected, came galloping madly into Versailles, he found, to his profound disgust, the place to which he himself aspired already filled. Monsieur le Duc was the master of the realm, and Madame de Prie mistress of all that was his.