Our interests are too
opposite for Love ever to unite them." On this foundation is built
the origin of the animosity which, in the end, brought both these
great personages to the scaffold.
Whatever may have been the motive which gave rise to it, certain it
is that they never omitted any opportunity of persecuting each other.
The queen had no difficulty in pourtraying the duke as a man addicted
to the most profligate excesses, and in alienating from him the mind
of the king: he, on his side, found it as easy, by means of
surreptitious publications, to represent her as a woman given to
illicit enjoyments; so that, long before the revolution, the
character both of the queen and the duke were well known to the
public; and their example tended not a little to increase the general
dissoluteness of morals. The debaucheries of the one served as a
model to all the young rakes of fashion; while the levity of the
other, was imitated by what were termed the _amiable_ women of the
capital.
After his exile in 1788, the hatred of M. d'Orleans towards the queen
roused that ambition which he inherited from his ancestors. In
watching her private conduct, in order to expose her criminal
weaknesses, he discovered a certain political project, which gave
birth to the idea of his forming a plan of a widely-different nature.
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