heart, there resided a soul matured before its time, disciplined and for ever superior to cowardly weaknesses.”[255] And it was a very different Paris to which she returned. The austere and bigoted _régime_ of Louis XIV. and Madame de Maintenon, where even the most profligate and reckless had been constrained to some semblance of decorum, was no more, and the pent-up impatience of a corrupt society was finding relief in a veritable saturnalia of sensuality. Vice, which for so many years had scarcely dared to rear its head, now stalked abroad, naked and unashamed; virtue, and even ordinary decency, was mocked at and derided. The Regent himself set the tone in moral depravity, and his example was followed by the Princes and Princesses of the Blood, by the bulk of the nobility and by a considerable proportion of the wealthy middle-class. “The disorderly and foolish life in Paris,” writes the old Duchesse d’Orléans, “becomes every day more detestable and more horrible. Every time it thunders I tremble for this town.”[256] To send a beautiful and unprotected young woman into the midst of so licentious a Court was, to say the least of it, a very injudicious action on de Prie’s part, and some contemporary writers are of opinion that it was his deliberate intention to launch her upon some gallant adventure. In this, as we shall presently see, they have probably done him an injustice; but, however that may be, nothing in the conduct of his wife during the first months after her arrival in Paris indicates that she had the least idea of speculating in her charms. Since it was, of course, out of the question for her to demand the hospitality of her detestable mother, she installed herself with her little daughter in a small house close to the Convent of La Conception, belonging to one of her aunts, Madame de Séchelles, to whom she paid an annual rent of 500 livres, for the use of a portion of it. She lived very quietly, for she was almost entirely without resources, and seldom went into Society, though, in accordance with her husband’s instructions, she solicited audiences of the Regent, the Abbé Dubois, Torcy, and, indeed, every one who might be able to be of assistance to the impecunious Ambassador. The interviews which took place between her detested daughter and these distinguished persons did not escape Madame de Pléneuf, and, thanks to the malevolent activity of her and her friends, a rumour soon began to spread that the young Ambassadress, whose beauty never failed to cause a sensation wherever she appeared, was employing her charms to mend her broken fortunes. She was accused of prostituting herself to the Maréchal de la Feuillade, to d’Alincourt and to Torcy, and of having made an attempt to subjugate the heart of the Regent, who, it was added, had repulsed her, either because she had not pleased him, or because he regarded her as too dangerous a mistress.