He was also the great-great-grandson of the Charles d'Albert, duc de Luynes, a favorite of King Louis XIII.

[1] Considered one of the "seminary-trained clerical aristocrats," the Cardinal was called upon in the Fontainebleau of Marie Antoinette to rebuke the fashionable vices of courtiers:[5] "Everything he had prepared had been composed in order to recall high society to the unassuming ways of real Christians.

Some hundred of peasants, sitting on their clogs, surrounded by the baskets they had used to carry their vegetables or fruit to market, listened to His Eminence without understanding a single word he addressed to them...[But he was heard] to cry out, in the vehemence of the perfect pastor, 'My dear brethren, why do you bring this luxury with you into the very entrance to the sanctuary?

Why do these velvet cushions, these laced and fringed handbags, lie in front of your entry into the Lord's house?

[7] In 1776, when correspondeding with the physician Théophile de Bordeu regarding de Bordeau's recommendation that the Cardinal refrain from eating chocolate, which his personal doctor encouraged, he wrote: "The view of the learned chemist who has analysed it and who concludes from these experiments that the use of cacao is very advantageous for old people, whose radical moisture dries out with age; the experiment I made over two years of the marked advantage that I always derived from it with regard to the looseness of the belly and the sweetening of my phlegm, have caused me to remain firm in my sentiment and the more so since it is not out of gourmandise that I am attached to it, my palate in no may please by the taste of cacao.