one after the other, Mme de Prie, Mme de Mailly, Mme de Ch teauneuf, Mme de Pompadour, and Mme du Barry govern Louis there is barely a minister without his Egeria, to such a point that Montesquieu thinks that in France everything is done by women; they constitute, he says, 'a new state within the state'; and Coll writes on the eve of 'They have so taken over Frenchmen, they have subjugated them so greatly that they think about and feel only for themselves.'