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 vestige of manliness, could make no appeal. She wanted "men" to pay her homage; and, like Catherine of Russia, she had them in abundance--lovers who were only too ready to pay court to a beautiful Princess, who might one day be Queen of France. For the Dauphin was now dead; his eldest son, the Duc de Bourgogne, had followed him to the grave a few months later. Prince Philip had renounced his right to the French crown when he accepted that of Spain; and, between her husband and the throne there was now but one frail life, that of the three-year-old Duc d'Anjou, a child so delicate that he might easily not survive his great-grandfather, Louis, whose hand was already relaxing its grasp of the sceptre he had held so long.