I have little need to say anything more of Madame la Duchesse de Berry.
These pages have already painted her. She was a strange mixture of pride
and shamelessness. Drunkenness, filthy conversation, debauchery of the
vilest kind, and impiety, were her diversions, varied, as has been seen,
by occasional religious fits. Her indecency in everything, language,
acts, behaviour, passed all bounds; and yet her pride was so sublime that
she could not endure that people should dare to speak of her amid her
depravity, so universal and so public; she had the hardihood to declare
that nobody had the right to speak of persons of her rank, or blame their
most notorious actions!

Yet she had by nature a superior intellect, and, when she wished, could
be agreeable and amiable. Her face was commanding, though somewhat
spoiled at last by fat. She had much eloquence, speaking with an ease
and precision that charmed and overpowered. What might she not have
become, with the talents she possessed! But her pride, her violent
temper, her irreligion, and her falsehood, spoiled all, and made her what
we have seen her.




CHAPTER XCIX

Law had established his Mississippi Company, and now began to do marvels
with it. A sort of language had been invented, to talk of this scheme,
language which, however, I shall no more undertake to explain than the
other finance operations. Everybody was mad upon Mississippi Stock.
Immense fortunes were made, almost in a breath; Law, besieged in his