She views like a virtuous woman the debauchery of the period, and that of her family, and she expresses the deep disgust she feels for it. The regent has never been better painted than he is by his mother; she shows him to us with his facile faculties, his interests of all kinds, his talents, his individual genius, his graces, his indulgence for all, even for his enemies; she denounces the one great capital fault that ruined him,--that ardent debauchery at a fixed hour, in which he buried himself and was lost to sight until the next morning. "All advice, all remonstrance on that subject," she writes, "are useless; when spoken to he answers, 'From six o'clock in the morning till night I am subjected to prolonged and fatiguing labour; if I did not amuse myself after that I could not bear it, I should die of melancholy.' I pray God sincerely for his conversion," she adds, "he has no other fault than that, but that is great." She shows him to us as a libertine even in matters of science, that is, curious and amorous of all he saw, but disgusted with all he possessed. "Though he talks of learned things, I see plainly that instead of giving him pleasure they bore him. I have often scolded him for this; he answers it is not his fault; that he does take pleasure in learning all things, but as soon as he knows them he has no further pleasure in them." The most characteristic passages in her letters are of things that cannot be detached and cited singly. Never did the effrontery and gluttony of women of all ranks, the cupidity of everybody, the shameless traffic and cynical thirst for gold, find a firmer or more vigorous hand to catch them in the act and blast them. Madame, in treating of these excesses, has a species of virtuous immodesty like that of Juvenal; or rather, issuing from her Bible readings, she applies to present scandals the energy of the sacred text, and qualifies them in the language of the patriarchs. "How many times," says one of her eulogists whom I like to quote, "how many times she condemned the bold negligence of attire which favoured corruption, and the taste for liberty and caprice--the fatal charm which our nation has criminally invented! Indecent fashions, which ancient decorum cannot away with, would often bring upon her face and in her eyes the emotion and fire of outraged modesty." It was not a mere sentiment of etiquette which made her rebuke her grand-daughter, the Duchesse de Berry, on her dishabille, but another and a more estimable sentiment. Even where she is not outraged she gives details which make her smile with pity. "It is only too true that the women paint themselves blue veins to make believe their skins are so delicate the veins show through them."