His testament, as he had foreseen, was set aside, much as his father's had been. Philippe d'Orléans summoned the Parlement, which granted him full power as regent, with freedom to compose the council as he liked, and the government of the royal household was taken from the Duc du Maine after a most unseemly altercation. All the solemn and pompous traditions of the court were likewise abandoned. "What does it matter to the State," said the regent, "whether it is I or my lackey who rides in a carriage." He took for his minister and councillor the Abbé Dubois, "a little, thin man, like a weasel," said Saint-Simon, "in whom _all_ the vices, perfidiousness, avarice, debauchery, ambition, and base flattery, struggled for the mastery." The general demoralization caused by the collapse of the great financial schemes of John Law was only a feature in the general abandonment of all restraint in the pursuit of pleasure. In the midst of this luxury of effrontery, there suddenly appeared the imposing and barbaric figure of Peter the Great of Russia, who visited Paris in the spring of 1717, and dismayed the court and the Parisians by the simplicity and directness of his character, his disregard for their voluptuous frivolity, and his appreciation of the things only that make for greatness in a State. He did not hesitate to prophesy, from what he saw and learned, the approaching decadence and ruin of the French monarchy and the French people. [Illustration: BEFORE THE ATTACK. After a water-color by J. Koppay.] At the age of thirteen, in February, 1723, Louis XV was declared to have attained his majority and assumed the reins of government, nominally at least, for the regent had taken care to give him Dubois for prime minister. Both these illustrious personages, however, died in the course of the year, and were succeeded by the Duc de Bourbon, "ugly and one-eyed, low, mediocre, hypocritical, a man of little led by a woman of nothing, Madame de Prie," and who renewed the persecution of the Protestants and the Jansenists. The young king contented himself with "showing at the council table his handsome and impassible countenance, which nothing ever animated. When not thus engaged, when he was neither gambling nor hunting, he occupied himself with tapestry-making, turning snuff-boxes in wood, or reading either the secret correspondence with his ambassadors, which he maintained unknown to his ministers, or the scandalous recitals which the lieutenant of police sent him regularly every day." In the latter part of his reign, these habits were succeeded by even more ignoble ones, drunkenness and nameless vices.