Whilst doctors went on shaking their periwigged heads, and debating whether sparkling Champagne did or did not injure the nerves and produce gout, the timid might hearken to their counsels, but there were plenty of spirits bold enough to let the corks pop gaily, regardless of all consequences. The wine continued in high favour with the _viveurs_ of the capital, and especially with the brilliant band of titled scoundrels who formed the Court of Philippe le Débonnaire. 'When my son gets drunk,' wrote, on the 13th August 1716, the Princess Charlotte Elizabeth of Bavaria, the Regent's mother, 'it is not with strong drinks or spirituous liquors, but pure wine of Champagne;'[168] and as the pupil of the Abbé Dubois very seldom went to bed sober,[169] he must have consumed a fair amount of the fluid in question in the course of his career. Even his boon companion, the Duke de Richelieu, is forced to admit that there was a great deal more drunkenness about him than was becoming in a Regent of France; and that, as he could not support wine so well as his guests, he often rose from the table drunk, or with his wits wool-gathering. 'Two bottles of Champagne,' remarks the duke in his _Chronique_, 'had this effect upon him.' Desirous, seemingly, that such enjoyments should not be confined to himself alone, he abolished in 1719 sundry dues on wine in general, whilst his famous, or rather infamous, suppers conduced to the vogue of that sparkling Champagne which was an indispensable accompaniment of those _décolleté_ repasts. It unloosed the tongues and waistcoats of the _roués_ of the Palais Royal, the Nocés, Broglios, Birons, Brancas, and Canillacs; it lent an additional sparkle to the bright eyes of Mesdames de Parabère and de Sabran, and inspired the scathing remark from the lips of one of those fair frail ones, that 'God, after having made man, took up a little mud, and used it to form the souls of princes and lackeys.' It played its part, too, at the memorable repast at which the Regent and his favourite daughter so scandalised their hostess, the Duchess of Burgundy, and at the fatal orgie shared by the same pair on the terrace of Meudon. [Illustration: THE REGENT D'ORLÉANS (From the picture by Santerre).] The example set in such high quarters could not fail to be followed. Champagne fired the sallies of the wits and versifiers whom the Duchess of Maine gathered around her at Sceaux, and stimulated the madness which seized upon the whole of Paris at the bidding of the financier Law. It frothed, too, in the goblets which Bertin du Rocheret had the honour of filling with his own hand for Peter the Great, on the passage of the Northern Colossus through Reims in June 1717; and its consumption was increased by a decree of 1728, which especially provided that people proceeding to their country seats might take with them for their own use a certain quantity of this wine free of duty.