He was, according to his enemies, the son of an apothecary, his father being in fact a doctor of medicine of a respectable family, who kept a small drug store as part of the necessary outfit of a country practitioner.

[3] Dubois' policy was steadily directed towards maintaining the peace of Utrecht, and this made him the main opponent of the schemes of Cardinal Alberoni for the aggrandizement of Spain.

The regent was initially reluctant: though not himself a religious man, he could hardly regard Dubois as a suitable archbishop, at a time when the ambitious Claudine Guérin de Tencin was universally believed to be his mistress.

His next aim was the cardinalate, and, after long and most profitable negotiations on the part of Pope Clement XI, the red hat was given to him by Innocent XIII (1721), whose election was largely due to the bribes of Dubois.

He had accumulated an immense private fortune (though nothing compared to the avaricious acquisition of wealth of Concini, Richelieu, Mazarin, Fouquet, and Colbert) possessing in addition to his see the revenues of seven abbeys.

Dubois' portrait was thus drawn by his long-time rival, the Duc de St Simon (who kept a painting of him in his lavatory),[7] He was a little, pitiful, wizened, herringgutted man, in a flaxen wig, with a weasel's face, brightened by some intellect.

Dubois was unscrupulous, but so were his contemporaries, and whatever vices he had, he forged a European peace that, with the exception of small, restrained military expeditions against the Austrian Habsburgs, would last for a quarter of a century.

In 1789 appeared Vie privée du Cardinal Dubois, attributed to one of his secretaries, Mongez; and in 1815 his Mémoires secrets et correspondance inédite, edited by L de Sevelinges.