In 1701 her husband died. By her aunt Sophie's sensible advice, reconciliation followed with the king and also with good-natured Madame de Maintenon. Her son, after one or two successful campaigns in Spain, returned to France loaded with honors. He turned again to his mother with the old affection of his boyhood. Much may be forgiven the Duke of Chartres because of his sincere, even if tardy, goodness to his mother. Her old age was made happy by him. To others he might seem a heartless, dissipated roué, to her he was the eighth wonder of the world the strong, tender, manly son on whom she leaned. Her daughter, too, by frequent, loving letters brought her comfort. The Duchess of Orleans died December 8, 1722. Beside her coffin her son, then Regent of France, clasped his sister in his arms and the two wept bitterly for their German mother. Few women have been more loyal to their native country than Elizabeth of Orleans. A day or two before her death she said: "In everything I am now, what I have been all my life, wholly German. I despise those Germans who, from choice, speak and write habitually in a foreign tongue. Such sycophants are not worth a hair." More fully than any other woman of her day, Elizabeth of Orleans represents the nobler side of German womanhood in a period of national debasement. CHAPTER IX WOMAN HELD IN TIGHTENING BONDS Vice was the keynote of the first half of the eighteenth century in Europe. The moral miasma rising from that sink of iniquity, the late court of Louis XIV., and, infinitely more, that of Louis XV., enveloped Germany. Every little German court imagined itself a Versailles. Each German princeling esteemed himself a "Sun god." Mistresses were considered as necessary furnishings to every palace as tables or chairs. Augustus the Strong, of Saxony, is said to have been the father of three hundred and fifty-four illegitimate children. Vice spread through all ranks, often blighting the innocent no less than the guilty woman. Everywhere woman was man's toy. Faded, broken, ruined, she might be cast aside at his caprice. Without semblance of law, he might hold her captive, as in the case of the beautiful Baroness Cosel, a discarded mistress of Frederick Augustus of Saxony, who was kept in prison for fifty years by his majesty's command. Later, as we shall see, the wife of Prince George Louis of Hanover afterward George I. of England suffered a similar fate. War continued. There were no long intervals of peace. Drunkenness, if possible, increased; certainly it did not decrease. Obscene practical jokes were constantly played. Ordinary conversation was interlarded with indecent words and the most vulgar phrases. Society was rotten to the core.