As for Pergami, the idol with the feet of clay, who had clouded her last years in tragedy, he survived for twenty years more to enjoy his honours and his ill-gotten gold; while William Austin, who had masqueraded as a Prince and called Caroline "mother," ended his days, while still a young man, in a madhouse. CHAPTER XX THE LOVE-AFFAIRS OF A REGENT When Louis XIV. laid down, one September day in the year 1715, the crown which he had worn with such splendour for more than seventy years, his sceptre fell into the hands of his nephew Philippe, Duc d'Orléans, who for eight years ruled France as Regent, and as guardian of the child-King, the fifteenth Louis. Seldom in the world's history has a reign, so splendid as that of the Sun-King, closed in such darkness and tragedy. The disastrous war of the Spanish Succession had drained France of her strength and her gold. She lay crushed under a mountain of debt--ten thousand million francs; she was reduced to the lowest depths of wretchedness, ruin, and disorder, and it was at this crisis in her life as a nation that fate placed a child of four on her throne, and gave the reins of power into the hands of the most dissolute man in Europe. Not that Philippe of Orleans lacked many of the qualities that go to the making of a ruler and a man. He had proved himself, in Italy and in Spain, one of the bravest of his country's soldiers, and an able, far-seeing leader of armies; and he had, as his Regency proved, no mean gifts of statesmanship. But his kingly qualities were marred by the taint of birth and early environment. Such good qualities as he had he no doubt drew from his mother, the capable, austere, high-minded Elizabeth of Bavaria, who to her last day was the one good influence in his life. To his father, Louis XIV.'s younger brother, who is said to have been son of Cardinal Mazarin, Anne of Austria's lover, and who was the most debased man of his time in all France, he just as surely owed the bias of sensuality to which he chiefly owes his place in memory. And not only was he thus handicapped by his birth; he had for tutor that arch-scoundrel Dubois--the "grovelling insect" who rarely opened his mouth without uttering a blasphemy or indecency, and who initiated his charge, while still a boy, into every base form of so-called pleasure. Such was the man who, amid the ruins of his country, inaugurated in France an era of licentiousness such as she had never known--an incomprehensible mass of contradictions--a kingly presence with the soul of a Caliban, statesman and sinner, high-minded and low-living, spending his days as a sovereign, a rôle which he played to perfection, and his nights as a sot and a sensualist.