summarily dispensed with.

With the return of health, the Duchesse's piety quickly evaporated. It
is true that she had had a fright; and, by way of modified penitence,
she vowed to dress herself and her household in white for six months and
also to make a husband of her lover. Within a few weeks, de Riom led the
Regent's daughter to the altar, thus throwing the cloak of the Church
over the licence of the past.

Now that our Princess was once more a "respectable" woman, she returned
gladly to her old life of indulgence; until the Duchess Palatine
exclaimed in alarm, "I am afraid her excesses in drinking and eating
will kill her." And never was prediction more sure of early fulfilment.
When she was not keeping company with her brandy bottle, she was gorging
herself with delicacies of all kinds, from patties and fricassees to
peaches and nectarines, washed down with copious draughts of iced beer.

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