Madame du Barry, as I have said, was the fountain or channel of all these disorders. The doting Monarch was enchanted with her indelicacy, vulgarism, and indecencies, the novelty of which seemed to him simplicity. Her mirth was childish romping; her sallies, buffoonish insults; her conversation, solecisms and ignorance. She pulled off the Chancellor’s wig, spat in the Duc de Laval’s face at her levee--he deserved it, for he let her repeat it; and the King, who deserved it still more, she called “fool!” and bade hold his tongue. Those who offended her, she threatened with her power; those who bowed to her, she treated little better. To none she was generous, for herself she was rapacious. She had two governesses of very different characters and understandings, but the congenial idiot had most weight with her. This was the Comtesse de Valentinois, wife of, but parted from, the brother of the Prince of Monaco, and herself sole heiress of the Duc de St. Simon. She was a handsome woman, finely made, but mischievous, impertinent, and too notorious for her promiscuous amours even to pass for gallant. The Maréchale Duchesse de Mirepoix had preceded Madame de Valentinois in the direction of the mistress. No head was better, no temper colder than the Maréchale’s. Of great pride, but capable of any meanness to supply her profusions at play, she had joined the mistress to supplant the Minister; but whether Madame du Barry’s want of generosity chilled the Maréchale’s importunities for money, or whether her alliance with the House of Lorrain[202] made her incapable of digesting the low familiarities of the mistress, or whether a prospect of ingratiating herself with the young Dauphiness, governed by Madame Adelaide, and consequently an enemy to the mistress, swayed the Maréchale to swerve from her plan, it is certain she conceived and expressed both aversion and contempt for Madame du Barry, and even declined attending her to an audience of the Dauphiness, to which Madame de Valentinois, more compliant, introduced her. While I was now at Paris, having been long intimate with Madame de Mirepoix and her family, at Florence, in England, and at Paris, she told me many anecdotes of that silly and imperious favourite, most of which I heard attested by the general voice, or at least corroborated by similar incidents. One I will mention. At supper with the King she drank out of the punch-ladle, and returned it into the bowl. The King said, “Fy donc! vous donnez votre crachat à boire à tout le monde;” she replied “Eh bien! je veux que tout le monde boive mon crachat.” The same night my friend Madame du Deffand asking the Maréchale what would become of Madame du Barry should the King die? she replied bitterly, “Elle iroit à la Salpêtrière, et elle est très faite pour y aller.” As Madame de Mirepoix was not in the odour of sincerity, I much suspected her of being concerned in an event of that time, which, however, she affected to assign as the cause of her resentment