from Neuilly to Notre Dame, the scene at Neuilly was truly heartrending.  My father has seen the King and the Princes several times since the catastrophe, and he says it has done the work of years on their personal appearance, The Due de Nemours has neither eaten nor slept since his brother died, and looks as if walking out of his grave.  Mamma wrote him a few lines of condolence, which he answered by a most affecting note.  Papa was summoned to attend the King to the House, as Grand Officier, and says he never witnessed such a scene.  Even the opposition shed their crocodile tears.  Placed immediately near the King on the steps of the throne, he saw the struggle between kingly decorum and fatherly affliction.  Nature had the victory.  Three times the King attempted to speak, three times he was obliged to stop, and at last burst into a flood of tears.  The contagion gained all around him.  And it was only interrupted by sobs that he could proceed.  And it is in the face of this despair, when the body of the prince is scarcely cold, that that horrid Thiers and his associates begin afresh their infernal manoeuvres!”

A letter of the 3rd April, 1842, contains among a quantity of the gossip of the day an odd story, which, the writer says, “is putting Rome in a ferment, and the clergy in raptures.”  I think I remember that it made a considerable stir in ecclesiastic circles at the time.  A certain M. Ratisbonne, a Jew, it seems entered a church in Rome (the writer does not say so, but if I remember rightly, it was the “Gesu"), with a friend, a M. de Bussieres, who had some business to transact in the sacristy.  The Jew, who professed complete infidelity, meantime was looking at the pictures.  But M. de Bussieres, when his business was done, found him prostrate on the pavement in front of a picture of the Madonna.  The Jew on coming to himself declared that the Virgin had stepped from her frame, and addressed him, with the result, as he said, that having fallen to the ground an infidel, he rose a convinced Christian!  Mademoiselle D’Henin writes in a tone which indicates small belief in the miracle, but seems to accept as certain the further facts, that the convert gave all he possessed to the Church and became a monk.

I have recently—­even while transcribing these extracts from her letters—­heard of the death, within the last few years, of the writer of them.  She died in England, I am told, and unmarried.  Her sympathies and affections were always strongly turned to her mother’s country, as indeed may be in some degree inferred from even those passages of her letters which have been given.  And I can well conceive that the events which, each more disastrous than its predecessor, followed in France shortly after the date of the last of them, may have rendered, especially after the death of her parents, a life in France distasteful to her.  But I, and, I think, my mother also, had entirely lost sight of her for very many years.  Had I imagined that she was living in England, I should undoubtedly have endeavoured to see her.