next day, when
the musketeers had relieved the guards, the young fellows, not knowing
what to do to amuse themselves, resolved to play at a parliament. They
elected a chief and other presidents, the King's ministers, and the
advocates. These things being settled, and having received a sausage
and a pie for breakfast, they pronounced a sentence, in which they
condemned the sausage to be cooked and the pie to be cut up.

All these things make me tremble for my son. I receive frequently
anonymous letters full of dreadful menaces against him, assuring me that
two hundred bottles of wine have been poisoned for him, and, if this
should fail, that they will make use of a new artificial fire to burn him
alive in the Palais Royal.

It is too true that Madame d'Orleans loves her brother better than her
husband.

The Duc du Maine says that if, by his assistance, the King should obtain
the direction of his own affairs, he would govern him entirely, and would
be more a monarch than the King, and that after my son's death he would
reign with his sister.

A week ago I received letters in which they threatened to burn my son at
the Palais Royal and me at Saint Cloud. Lampoons are circulated in
Paris.

My son has already slept several times at the Tuileries, but I fear that
the King will not be able to accustom himself to his ways, for my son
could never in his life play with children: he does not like them.

He was once beloved, but since the arrival of that cursed Law he is hated
more and more. Not a week passes without my receiving by the post
letters filled with frightful threats, in which my son is spoken of as a
bad man and a tyrant.

I have just now received a letter in which he is threatened with poison.
When I showed it to him he did nothing but laugh, and said the Persian
poison could not be given to him, and that all that was said about it was
a fable.

To-morrow the Parliament will return to Paris, which will delight the
Parisians as much as the departure of Law.

That old Maintenon has sent the Duc du Maine about to tell the members of
the Royal Family that my son poisoned the Dauphin, the Dauphine, and the
Duc de Berri. The old woman has even done more she has hinted to the
Duchess that she is not secure in her husband's house, and that she
should ask her brother for a counter-poison, as she herself was obliged
to do during the latter days of the King's life.

The old woman lives very retired. No one c