The next trouble in the new reign was the alienation of public favor from Lafayette, who had done so much to place the king upon the throne.  He was accused by one party of truckling to the new court, by the other of being too much attached to revolutionary methods and republican institutions.  He was removed from the command of the National Guard, and his office of commander-in-chief of that body was abolished.

All Europe becomes “a troubled sea” when a storm breaks over France.  “I never remember,” writes Greville at this period, “days like these, nor read of such,—­the terror and lively expectation that prevails, and the way in which people’s minds are turned backward and forward from France to Ireland, then range exclusively from Poland to Piedmont, and fix again on the burnings, riots, and executions that are going on in England.”

Meantime France was subsiding into quiet, with occasional slight shocks of revolutionary earthquake, before returning to order and peace.  The king was le bon bourgeois.  He had lived a great deal in England and the United States, and spoke English well.  He had even said in his early youth that he was more of an Englishman than a Frenchman.  He was short and stout.  His head was shaped like a pear, and was surmounted by an elaborate brown wig; for in those days people rarely wore their own gray hair.

He did not impress those who saw him as being in any way majestic; indeed, he looked like what he was,—­le bon pere de famille.  As such he would have suited the people of England; but it was un vert galant like Henri IV., or royalty incarnate, like Louis XIV., who would have fired the imagination of the French people.  As a good father of a family, Louis Philippe felt that his first duty to his children was to secure them a good education, good marriages, and sufficient wealth to make them important personages in any sudden change of fortune.

At the time of his accession all his children were unmarried,—­indeed, only four of them were grown up.  The sons all went to college,—­which means in France what high-school does with us.  Their mother’s dressing-room at Neuilly was hung round with the laurel-crowns, dried and framed, which had been won by her dear school-boys.

The eldest son, Ferdinand, Duke of Orleans, was an extraordinarily fine young man, far more a favorite with the French people than his father.  Had he not been killed in a carriage accident in 1842, he might now, in his old age, have been seated on the French throne.

One of the first objects of the king was to secure for his heir a suitable marriage.  A Russian princess was first thought of; but the Czar would not hear of such a mesalliance.  Then the hand of an Austrian archduchess was sought, and the young lady showed herself well pleased with the attentions of so handsome and accomplished a suitor; but her family were as unfavorable to the match as was the Czar of Russia.  Finally, the Duke of Orleans had to content himself with a German Protestant princess, Helene of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, a woman above all praise, who bore him two sons,—­the Comte de Paris, born in 1838, and the Duc de Chartres, born a year or two later.