"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.