The Mississippi business had come to an abrupt end and the Duc d’Orléans came, against my advice, to pronounce his useless edict against gemstones. Those who owned some, after having shown eagerness and experienced difficulty in selling them, preferred to keep them by hiding them, which is much easier to do with gems than with money, so that despite all the sleights of hand and various threats of imprisonment, the financial situation had been only very slightly and very temporarily bettered. Le Moine knew this and thought he could make M. the Duc d’Orléans believe the situation would improve if he could persuade him that it was possible to make diamonds. He hoped at the same time thereby to flatter that prince’s detestable tastes for chemistry, and thus gain his favor. This did not happen right away. But it was not difficult to approach M. the Duc d’Orléans provided one possessed neither high birth, nor virtue. We have seen what the dinners of those ruffians were, from which only good company were kept at a distance by careful exclusion. Le Moine, however, who had spent his life buried in the most obscure debauchery and did not know even one person at court who could call him by name, did not know whom to address in order to win access to the Palais Royal; but in the end, La Mouchi did the honors. He saw M. the Duc d’Orléans, told him that he knew how to make diamonds, and this prince, naturally credulous, fell for it. I thought at first that the best thing was to approach the King through Maréchal. But I feared breaking the news, which might hurt the one I wanted to save, so I resolved to go straight to the Palais Royal. I ordered my carriage, simmering with impatience, and I threw myself into it like a man who is taking leave of his senses. I had often said to M. the Duc d’Orléans that I was not a man to importune him with my advice, but that when I had any, if I dared say, to give him, he should believe it was urgent, so I asked him to do me the good favor of receiving me right away since I had never been of a humor to wait quietly in the anteroom. His chief valets could have saved me that trouble, in any case, because of the knowledge I had of the whole inner workings of his court. But that day he had me come in as soon as my carriage had pulled up in the inmost courtyard of the Palais Royal, which was always full of those to whom entrance should have been forbidden, since, by a shameful prostitution of all dignities and by the deplorable weakness of the Regent, those who were of the lowest quality, who did not even fear making their way up in long coats, could penetrate the court just as easily as dukes and almost on the same standing. Those are matters one might treat as being of no consequence, but to which men of the previous reign would not have given credence, who, fortunately for them, had died promptly enough not to witness such things. Immediately ushered into the presence of the Regent whom I found without a single one of his surgeons or other domestics, and after I had greeted him with a very perfunctory bow that was returned me in exactly the same way: “Well, what is it now?” he asked awkwardly, as if humoring me. “Since you order me to speak, Monsieur,” I said heatedly, keeping my gaze fixed on his own, which could not sustain it, “it is only that you are in the process of losing in the eyes of everyone the little esteem and consideration”—those were the very words I used—“that most of society has kept for you.”
And, sensing him deeply wounded (because of which, despite what I knew of his insouciance, I conceived some hope), without pausing, so as to unburden myself once and for all of the unfortunate medicine I had to make him swallow, and so as not to give him time to interrupt me, I represented to him with the most frightful detail with what abandon he lived at the court, and how advanced this neglect — the right word had to be said, this contempt — had become in a few years; how these would be increased by the intrigues that would not fail to use the so-called inventions of Le Moine to cast wicked accusations against the Duc d’Orléans himself that might be absurd, but dangerous down to the last point; I reminded him — and I still tremble sometimes, at night when I wake up, when I think of the boldness I had in using these very words — that he had been accused many times of poisoning the princes who barred his way to the throne; that this great pile of gemstones they would have accepted as real would help him more easily attain the throne of Spain, for which reason no one doubted there was an entente between him, the Viennese court, the Emperor, and Rome; that because of the detestable authority of Rome he rejected Mme d’Orléans, and that it was a blessing from Providence for him that her recent confinements were fortunate, since otherwise the wicked rumors of poisoning would have been renewed; that to tell the truth, for desiring the death of Madame his wife, he was not like his brother guilty of Italian taste — these were my very terms — but that it was the only vice of which he was not accused (along with not having clean hands), since his relations with Mme la Duchesse de Berry seemed to many not to be those of a father; that if he had not inherited the abominable taste of Monsieur for all the rest, he was indeed his son from the habit of the perfumes that had put him out of favor with the king who could not bear them, and later on had favored the frightful rumors of having made an attempt on the Dauphine’s life, and by having always put into practice the detestable maxim of dividing to conquer with the help of repeating rumors from one person to another which were the plague of his court, as they had been that of Monsieur, his father, where they had prevented a unified reign: that he had preserved for Monsieur’s favorites a consideration that he did not grant to another, and that it was they — I did not force myself to name Effiat — who, aided by Mirepoix and La Mouchi, had cleared the way for Le Moine; that having as his only shield only men who no longer counted for anything after the death of Monsieur and who during his life had only amounted to anything because of the horrid conviction everyone had, even the king who had thus arranged to marry Mme d’Orléans, that one could obtain anything from them by means of money, and from him by those in whose clutches he was, no one feared attacking him by the most odious, the most intimate calumny, that it was high time, if indeed there still was time, for him finally to recover his grandeur and there was only one way to do that: to take measures in the greatest secrecy to have Le Moine arrested and, as soon as the thing was decided, not to delay the execution of it, and not to let him ever return to France.