a substitute in Madame du Caylus,—­one of those interesting and accomplished women peculiar to France.  She was not ambitious of ruling the king, as her aunt, Madame de Maintenon, was of governing Louis XIV., and her virtue was unimpeachable.  She wrote to the king letters twice a day, but visited him only once a week.  She was the tool of a cabal, rather than the leader of a court; but her influence was healthy, ennobling, and religious.  Louis XVIII. was not what would be called a religious man; he performed his religious duties regularly, but in a perfunctory manner.  He was not, however, a hypocrite or a pharisee, but was simply indifferent to religious dogmas, and secretly averse to the society of priests.  When he was dying, it was with great difficulty that he could be made to receive extreme unction.  He died without pain, recommending to his brother, who was to succeed him, to observe the charter of French liberties, yet fearing that his blind bigotry would be the ruin of the family and the throne, as events proved.  The last things to which the dying king clung were pomps and ceremonies, concealing even from courtiers his failing strength, and going through the mockery of dress and court etiquette to almost the very day of his death, in 1824.

The Comte d’Artois, now Charles X., ascended the throne, with the usual promises to respect the liberties of the nation, which his brother had conscientiously maintained.  Unfortunately Charles’s intellect was weak and his conscience perverted; he was a narrow-minded, bigoted sovereign, ruled by priests and ultra-royalists, who magnified his prerogatives, appealed to his prejudices, and flattered his vanity.  He was not cruel and blood-thirsty,—­he was even kind and amiable; but he was a fool, who could not comprehend the conditions by which only he could reign in safety; who could not understand the spirit of the times, or appreciate the difficulties with which he had to contend.

What was to be expected of such a monarch but continual blunders, encroachments, and follies verging upon crimes?  The nation cared nothing for his hunting-parties, his pleasures, and his attachment to mediaeval ceremonies; but it did care for its own rights and liberties, purchased so dearly and guarded so zealously; and when these were gradually attacked by a man who felt himself to be delegated from God with unlimited powers to rule, not according to laws but according to his caprices and royal will, then the ferment began,—­first in the legislative assemblies, then extending to journalists, who controlled public opinion, and finally to the discontented, enraged, and disappointed people.  The throne was undermined, and there was no power in France to prevent the inevitable catastrophe.  In Russia, Prussia, and Austria an overwhelming army, bound together by the mechanism which absolutism for centuries had perfected, could repress disorder; but in a country where the army was comparatively small, enlightened by the ideas of the Revolution and fraternizing with the people, this was not possible.  A Napoleon, with devoted and disciplined troops, might have crushed his foes and reigned supreme; but a weak and foolish monarch, with a disaffected and scattered army, with ministers who provoked all the hatreds and violent passions of legislators, editors, and people alike, was powerless to resist or overcome.