Success seemed to be assured. Mademoiselle Aissé was to exchange slavery to her late owner for an equally odious place in the harem of the ruler of France. Her tears and entreaties were all in vain; when she begged on her knees to be allowed to retire to a convent Madame de Feriol turned her back on her. Her only hope of rescue now lay in the Regent himself; and to him she pleaded her cause with such pathetic eloquence that he not only allowed her to depart in peace, but with words of sympathy and promises of his protection in the pure and noble sense of the word.
Thus by the chivalry of the most dissolute man of his age the Circassian slave-girl was rescued from a life which to her would have been worse than death--to spend her remaining years, happy in the love of an honest man, the Chevalier d'Aydie, until death claimed her while she still possessed the beauty which had been at once her glory and her inevitable shame.
The close of the Regent's mis-spent life came with tragic suddenness. Worn out with excesses, while still young in years, his doctors had warned him that death might come to him any day; but with the light-heartedness that was his to the last, he laughed at their gloomy forebodings and refused to take the least precautions to safeguard his health. Two days before the end came he declined point-blank to be bled in order to avert a threatened attack of apoplexy. "Let it come if it will," he said, with a laugh. "I do not fear death; and if it comes quickly, so much the better!"
On the evening of 2nd December, 1720, he was chatting gaily to the young Duchesse de Falari, when he suddenly turned to her and asked: "Do you think there is any hell--or Paradise?" "Of course I do," answered the Duchesse. "Then are you not afraid to lead the life you do?" "Well," replied Madame, "I think God will have pity on me."
Scarcely had the words left her lips when the Regent's head fell heavily on her shoulder, and he began to slip to the floor. A glance showed her that he was unconscious; and, rushing out of the room, the terrified Duchesse raced through the dark, deserted corridors of the palace shrieking for help. When at last help arrived, it came too late. The Regent had gone to find for himself an answer to the question his lips had framed a few minutes earlier--"is there any hell--or Paradise?"