[Illustration: The Duke of Maine----71]

All this toil ended in the following declaration on the part of the
legitimatized princes: "The affair, being one of state, cannot be decided
but by a king, who is a major, or indeed by the States-general." At the
same time, and still at the instigation of the Duchess of Maine, thirty-
nine noblemen signed a petition, modestly addressad to "Our Lords of the
Parliament," demanding, in their turn, that the affair should be referred
to the states-general, who alone were competent, when it was a question
of the succession to the throne.

The Regent saw the necessity of firmness. "It is a maxim," he declared,
"that the king is always a major as regards justice; that which was done
without the states-general has no need of their intervention to be
undone." The decree of the council of regency, based on the same
principles, suppressed the right of succession to the crown, and cut
short all pretensions on the part of the legitimatized princes' issue to
the rank of princes of the blood; the rights thereto were maintained in
the case of the Duke of Maine and the Count of Toulouse, for their lives,
by the bounty of the Regent, "which did not prevent the Duchess of Maine
from uttering loud shrieks, like a maniac," says St. Simon, "or the
Duchess of Orleans from weeping night and day, and refusing for two
months to see anybody." Of the thirty-nine members of the nobility who
had signed the petition to Parliament, six were detained in prison for a
month, after which the Duke of Orleans pardoned them. "You know me, well
enough to be aware that I am only nasty when I consider myself positively
obliged to be," he said to them. The patrons, whose cause these noblemen
had lightly embraced, were not yet at the end of their humiliations.

[Illustrations: The Duchess of Maine----72]