n this of the Duc
d'Orleans' prodigal daughter with the almost imbecile grandson of the
French King. The Duc de Berry, it is true, was good to look upon. Tall,
fair-haired, with a good complexion and splendid health, he was
physically, at twenty-four, no unworthy descendant of the great Louis.
He had, too, many amiable qualities calculated to win affection; but he
was mentally little better than a clown. His education had been
shamefully neglected; he had been suppressed and kept in the background
until, in spite of his manhood, he had all the shyness, awkwardness and
dullness of a backward child.

As he himself confessed to Madame de Saint-Simon, "They have done all
they could to stifle my intelligence. They did not want me to have any
brains. I was the youngest, and yet ventured to argue with my brother.
Afraid of the results of my courage, they crushed me; they taught me
nothing except to hunt and gamble; they succeeded in making a fool of
me, one incapable of anything and who will yet be the laughing-stock of
everybody."

Such was the weak-kneed husband to whom was now allied the most
precocious, headstrong young woman in all France; who, although still
short of her sixteenth birthday, was a past-mistress of the arts of
pleasure, and was now determined to have her full fling at any cost. She
had been thoroughly spoiled by her too indulgent father, who was even
then the most powerful man in France after the King; and she was in no
mood to brook restraint from anyone, even from Louis himself.

The pleasures of the table seem now to have absorbed the greater part
of her life. Read what her grandmother, the Princess Palatine, says of
her: "Madame de Berry does not eat much at dinner. How, indeed, can she?
She never leaves her room before noon, and spends her mornings in eating
all kinds of delicacies. At two o'clock she sits down to an elaborate
dinner, and does not rise from the table until three. At four she is
eating again--fruit, salad, cheese, etc. She takes no exercise whatever.
At ten she has a heavy supper, and retires to bed between one and two in
the morning. She likes very strong brandy." And in this last sentence we
have the true secret of her undoing. The Royal Princess was, even tat
this early age, a confirmed dipsomaniac, with her brandy bottle always
by her side; and was seldom sober, from rising to retiring.

To such a woman, a slave to the senses, a husband like the Duc de Berry,
unredeemed by a ve