As a last desperate effort to reform her, at the eleventh hour, the Regent packed de Riom off to his regiment. A few days later, the Duchesse invited her father to a sumptuous banquet on the terrace at Meudon, at which, regardless of her delicate health, she ate and drank more voraciously than ever. The same evening she was taken ill; and when, on the following Sunday, her mother-in-law, the Duchess, visited her, she found the patient in a deplorable condition—wasted to a "shadow" and burning with fever. "She was suffering such horrible pains in her toes and under the feet," says the Duchess, "that tears came to her eyes. She looked so very bad that three doctors were called in consultation. They resolved to bleed her; but it was difficult to bring her to it, for her pains were so great that the least touch of the sheets made her shriek."
A few days later, in the early hours of 17th July, 1719, the Duchesse de Berry passed away in her sleep. The life which she had wasted with such shameless prodigality closed in peace; and at the moment when she was being laid to rest in the Church of St Denis, Madame de Mouchy, blazing in the dead woman's jewels, was laughing merrily over her champagne-glass at a dinner-party to which she had invited all the sharers in the orgies which had made the Palace of the Luxembourg infamous!
The moral of this pitifully squandered life needs no pointing out. And on reviewing it one can only in charity echo the words spoken by Madame de Meilleraye of another sinner, the Chevalier de Savoie, "For my part, I believe the good God must think twice before sending one born of such parents to the nether regions."
CHAPTER VII
A PRINCESS OF MYSTERY
In the spring of the year 1772 the fashionable world of Paris was full of speculation and gossip about a stranger, as mysterious as she was beautiful, who had appeared from no one knew where, in its midst, and who called herself the Princess Aly Émettée de Vlodimir. That she was a woman of rank and distinction admitted of no question. Her queenly carriage and the graciousness and dignity of her deportment were in keeping with the Royal character she assumed; but more remarkable than these evidences of high station was her beauty, which in its brilliance eclipsed that of the fairest women of Versailles and the Tuileries.
Tall, with a figure of exquisite modelling and grace, her daintily poised head crowned with a coronal of golden-brown hair, with a face of perfect oval, dimpled cheeks as delicately tinted as a rose, her chief glory lay in her eyes, large and lustrous, which had the singular quality of changing colour—"now blue, now black, which gave to their dreamy expression a peculiar, mysterious air."
Who was she, this woman of beauty and mystery? It was rumoured that she was a Circassian Princess, "the heroine of strange romances." She was living luxuriously in a fine house in the most fashionable quarter of Paris, in company with two German "Barons"—one, the Baron von Embs, who claimed to be her cousin; the other, Baron von Schenk, who appeared to play the rôle of guardian. To her salon in the Ile St Louis were flocking many of the greatest men in France, infatuated by her beauty, and paying homage to her charms. To a man, they adored the mysterious lady—from Prince Ojinski and other illustrious refugees from Poland to the Comte de Rochefort-Velcourt, the Duke of Limburg's representative at the French Court, and the wealthy old beau M. de Marine, who, it was said, placed his long purse at her disposal.