reign, was during this regency cast contemptuously aside; and a spectacle of unblushing profligacy was exhibited, to which the annals of civilised society afford no parallel. This, too, was the era of Law's famous Mississippi juggle. A universal torrent of venality and corruption threatened to sweep away every vestige of nobleness and virtue, and to convert the palaces of the Most Christian King into haunts of the lowest, the most demoralising licentiousness and vice. We forbear even to recapitulate the names of the persons who figured during this regency and the succeeding reign as the coroneted, diademed incarnations of the scandalous manners of the time. It is a spectacle from which we gladly avert our eyes; but in order to show those who may still be deceived by the ornate eloquence which has been employed to gild over the licentiousness of a state of society in which we are told 'vice lost half its evil by losing all its grossness,' we supply a few passages from the 'Memoirs of the Court of Louis XIV.,' by the Duchess of Orleans, the mother of the regent, published after her death. She thus speaks of the magnificent king himself, Louis the Great, as he is usually styled:-'Louis XIV., as all the rest of the family, with the exception of my son, hated reading. Neither the king nor Monsieur had been taught anything: they scarcely knew how to read or write. He (the king) had natural wit, but was extremely ignorant; and so much ashamed of it, that it became the fashion of his courtiers to turn learned men into ridicule.' The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes was a natural consequence of the superstitious bigotry of this great Bourbon. 'It is impossible,' writes the duchess, 'for a man to be more ignorant of religion than the king was. I cannot understand how his mother the queen could have brought him up with so little knowledge on this subject. That old Maintenon and Père la Chaise had persuaded him that all the sins he had committed would be pardoned, if he persecuted and extirpated the professors of the reformed religion, and that this was the only path to Heaven. The poor king believed it fervently, and the persecution commenced. He was earnest enough himself, and it was not his fault that hypocrisy reigned at court.' One or two extracts will sufficiently illustrate the refinement of manners prevalent in the 'vielle cour:'-'The Duchess of Bourbon can drink very copiously without being affected: her daughters would fain imitate her, but they soon get tipsy, and cannot control themselves as their mother does. Madame de Montespan and her eldest daughter could drink a large quantity of wine without being affected by it. I have seen them drink six bumpers of strong Turin Rosa Solis, beside the wine they had taken before I expected to see them fall under the table; but, on the contrary, it affected them no more than a draught of water.' 'Three years before her death the dauphiness changed greatly for the better: she played no more foolish tricks, and left off drinking to excess. Instead of that untameable manner which she had before, she became polite and sensible, kept up her dignity, and did not permit the younger ladies to be too familiar with her by dipping their fingers into her dish, rolling upon the bed, and similar elegancies.' Law, it appears from these memoirs, had submitted his scheme to Louis XIV.; but the tempting bait was rejected, not from any penetration of its impudent absurdity by the king, but, as his majesty himself assured the duchess, 'because Law was not a Roman Catholic, and therefore he ought not to confide in him.' Mined and hollow as was the ground under the French court and aristocracy, the thin surface upon which they danced, frolicked, laughed away their lives, gave as yet no token of the volcano slumbering beneath. 'Mr Law,' says the Duchess of Orleans, has taken refuge in the Palais-Royal. The populace have done him no harm, but his coachman has been pelted on his return, and the carriage broken to pieces. I heard the people talking. They said nothing against my son, and bestowed benedictions on me.' If this be true, a more patient, long-suffering, charitable people than the French-of this period at least-could nowhere be found. The reign of Louis XV. was one continued downward progress towards utter confusion and ruin in every department of the state. Imprisonments in the Bastile, and other of the king's castles-to use Mr Burke's respectful expression when writing regretfully of the violent destruction of that place of sighs-ordered by royal lettres-de-cachet, or sealed orders from the king, grew and multiplied: the use of these letters ad libitum was one of the most valued privileges of the favourite lady of the court. The noblesse, as in the rampant days of feudalism, claiming entire exemption from the burthens of the state, except military and naval service, the chief grades of which they monopolised, preyed upon the people, who bore all the public charges, without let or hindrance. Unfortunate people! so truly described in those days as one 'taillable et corvéable à merci et à miséricorde;' whose wives and daughters were to be frequently seen yoked like oxen to the plough, whilst the sons and daughters of idleness and vanity were trifling away their lives in the perfumed atmosphere of a corrupt and licentious court; and still more unfortunate, that there appeared to be no peaceful issue from the gulf of misery and degradation into which they were trampled; and that the only course left, if they would not remain plunged therein for ever, was, like that of Milton's Evil Spirit towards Paradise, through Chaos accompanied by Sin and Death! This king was not without able advisers, who, had he listened to them, might perhaps have averted the ruin which all men clearly saw was swiftly gathering for the near future; but the Bourbon race seemed doomed'Ephraim is given to idols-let him alone!' Choiseul, a sagacious man who had endured much, could not submit to the Dubarry domination, and threw up his employments in uncontrollable disgust. The catastrophe was at hand. The small-pox carried off Louis XV. after a brief illness: his body was hurried, without the slightest royal pomp or ceremonial, to the tomb; and his grandson, Louis XVI., encumbered and weighed down by the debts and sins of his predecessors-of the two last especially→ ascended the Bourbon throne. A king more unsuited to the evil days on which he had fallen than this amiable, well-intentioned sovereign, never assumed the diadem. The necessities of his position required a man of inflexible will, of eagle discernment, of iron courage and resolution; and he, unfortunate prince! was plastic as wax, weak as infancy itself in the hands of those he esteemed and trusted-of his wife especially. And Marie Antoinette, with all her early foibles and vanities, if compared with those who had preceded her in that court- or indeed judged by any standard, for it is an insult to the memory of the royal and most unhappy wife and mother to suggest such a comparison-was a pure-hearted, high minded woman, upon whose memory, spite of the malignant industry of her calumniators, there rests no imputation save that of a thoughtless gaiety of speech and manners-very bitterly expiated! We need not recount the steps which led swiftly and directly to the abyss. Cooler and wiser heads than those of Louis XVI. and his consort would have lost their balance amidst the tumultuous and hourly-increasing rage and fury of the at last uprisen people. Many causes have been assigned by ingenious commentators to account for this sudden frenzy, as they term it, of the French nation. The comedies of Beaumarchais, the mocking persiflage of Voltaire, the Contrat-Social of Rousseau, the speculations of the Encyclopedists, were, we are sometimes gravely told, the agencies which brought about the terrible convulsion. Without denying that these writings might have produced some effect upon those who read them, it seems difficult to comprehend how they could have stirred and inflamed the passions of the raging multitudes who really made the revolution, not one in a hundred of whom could read, or had ever heard of them! No-it was not irreverent persiflage, it was not dreamy speculations upon the origin of society, which kindled that consuming fire: it was the squalor of the ragged peasant in contrast with the effeminate splendour of the privileged noble-the pallid faces and wasted forms of the innumerable wretches who, according to the testimony of all impartial witnesses, prowled, famine and fever-stricken, through the highways and byways of the land-the hopeless, helpless degradation and poverty of the great body of the French people-the corruption and heartlessness of the mass of the privileged orders in both church and state-this was the burning irony, this the bitter writing traced in characters as huge as death and ruin, which the multitude read with flaming eyes, and sprang madly, blindly to their feet to revenge and to efface 'The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices Yet, except it were a crime in Louis XVI. that he was wanting in the energy and ability required to even partially atone for and repair the errors and follies of his race, he had done nothing worthy of bonds, much less of death. He had not, like Charles I. of England, made war upon his people, sought to destroy their liberties, endeavoured to convert a constitutional crown into an absolute one! But this is not the place to discuss the general question of the French Revolution: the personal fortunes of the Bourbon family mainly concern us in these pages. The trial of Louis, passively defending himself before the executioners of the Convention by a mild placidity and benevolence of aspect against which the epithets of 'tyrant,'' despot,' strike blunt and innocuous, appears, viewed by itself, a sad and terrible position for the head of so illustrious a race to be placed in; but in comparison with that assumed by another Bourbon, Philip, Duke of Orleans, the father of Louis-Philippe, who ascended the tribune of the hall of judgment, and with unfaltering voice said, 'I vote for death!' it is one to exult and glory in. Egalité would have added reasons for his judgment— did, it is said; but they were unheard amidst the abhorrent murmurs of an assembly who, albeit they sympathised with Marat and Maximilian Robes pierre, had hearts, many of them at least, that yet vibrated to some touch of human feeling. The death of the king was followed by the still more utterly inexcusable and detestable execution of the queen; and then justice was done upon D'Orleans. His son, the young Duke of Chartres, involved somewhat in Dumouriez' intrigues, happily escaped; and the only Bourbon remaining in the power of the revolutionists was the youthful son of the slain monarch, and on him was inflicted their fullest measure of vengeance, by the hands of a ruffian whose mission it was to dwarf, debase, and crush the mind and spirit of the young prince: happily in the process the frail tenement of earth gave way, and the husk and shell of what had once been the heir of France alone remained in the power of the brutal jailor. Upwards of twenty years of exile had passed over the heads of the expatriated Bourbons, when the reaction consequent upon the devouring ambition and unprincipled violence of Bonaparte drove that remorseless despot from the French throne, and replaced the Bourbons in the vacated chair. During the long interval that had elapsed since the execution of Louis XVI., only one incident in the fortunes of the French Bourbons requires notice in this place: this was the assassination of the Duke d'Enghien, seized in the neutral territory of Baden by order of Bonaparte, and, by that potentate's directions, shot at the castle of Vincennes the night after his capture. For this atrocity not the slightest excuse of any worth has ever been offered by the Emperor's apologists; and in sooth it was scarcely worth while to attempt a defence; for what matters one spot more or less on the crimson imperial robe? This young prince he was thirty-two years of age is said to have been a very amiable person, and to have entertained in a high degree the admiration of the conquering exploits of the French ruler, which still faintly lingers in the world. With him the race of Condé became virtually extinct, although his father, the Duke of Bourbon, survived till 1830. The mili tary council nominated by Murat, by whose immediate order he was slain, was presided over by one Guiton, a general of brigade. The chief accusation against the unfortunate young man, in support of which no evidence whatever, written or oral, was produced, was, that he had leagued himself with the English government-'enemy of France'-to assassinate Bonaparte, and to assist in the invasion of that country by the said government -enemy of France.' This phrase varies in the act of accusation from the old style, which used to be, the English government as incarnated in Mr Pitt, enemy of the human race' (ennemi du genre humain). Its general inimity had, it seems, become localised. The Duke d'Enghien died in the twelfth year of the Republic, month Ventose-that is, March 1804. 'There is only one Frenchman the more!' said Louis XVIII., when he again found himself at the Tuileries; and truly, if to place him there had been the object of such gigantic effort and waste of gallant lives, an end less worthy of the means employed could scarcely be conceived. But in truth the replacement of the Bourbons on the throne of France formed no part of the policy of this country in the determined, immitigable war which it waged against Napoleon. The object of the war was pithily indicated in Lord Eldon's reply when asked what England had gained by the result of the contest? 'England has gained,' replied the learned lord, 'all that she has not lost.' It was not only an enormous indiscretion, therefore, but a puerile vanity in the Bourbons to represent the attack upon France as having been undertaken with no other purpose than to thrust them upon a reluctant people. Their succession was the incidental consequence of the expulsion of Bonaparte; but, assuredly, to reinvest them with the sovereignty of France formed no part of the war-policy of Great Britain. Being there, however, by the grace of circumstances, it behoved them, if they could, to maintain their position. Unfortunately, before Louis XVIII. had well settled himself in the unaccustomed seat, Napoleon returned, and the Bourbons were compelled to set out on their travels once more. Only one member of the family, the Duchess d'Angoulême-the sole man among them, Bonaparte used to say-made any courageous effort to withstand the torrent which was once more sweeping them into exile. The duchess-a daughter of Louis XVI.-harangued the troops at Bordeaux, and passionately invoked St Louis, Henri Quatre, and other glories of old France. It would not do: the days of chivalry were gone: no swords leaped from their scabbards in answer to her eloquent appeals, and the royal lady perforce embarked once more for England. But the eagle's flight, audacious as it seemed, was this time feeble and transitory. Waterloo, the grave and monument of the imperial fortunes, was lost and won; and Louis XVIII., the Count d'Artois, the Duke and Duchess d'Angoulême, and the Duke de Berri, were once more in Paris. Louis XVIII. has the reputation-how acquired it would be difficult to say-of ability, or at least cleverness. At all events he was not quite so unteachable by experience as other members of his family, as the charter he promulgated (la charte octroyée) sufficiently testifies. The representative government established by that celebrated instrument was not so broadly based as might have been wished; still, it was an immense advance from the leaden chains and fetters of the imperial régime, gilded as they might be by the rays of a false and fantastic glory. In his foreign policy Louis showed himself to be as selfish and incorrigible as any of his race, and anxious rather to promote the power and splendour of his House than the interests, prosperity, and freedom of France. The Spanish people having, as they unquestionably had a right to do, improvised a new constitution, the French armies advanced into the Iberian peninsula in 1822 to the relief of Ferdinand the Beloved, monarch of that country, in whose opinion the new constitution was subversive of many of his royal Bourbon rights. The invading troops were commanded by the Duke d'Angoulême; and the hero of the Trocadero, besides emblazoning that great victory upon the roll which records the military triumphs of France, had the satisfaction of restoring his absolute crown to the Spanish Bourbon. This scandalous violation of national independence was defended and excused by the showy periods and shining sophisms of M. le Vicomte de Châteaubriand, at that time French minister for foreign affairs. Previous to this military exploit two events occurred which alternately depressed with sorrow and elevated with joy the elder Bourbons and their partisans. The Duke de Berri, who married Caroline of Naples, sister to Maria Christina, the present queen-mother of Spain, had taken leave of his wife at the entrance of the Opera-House, which she had just left, and |