For sixteen hours the duchess and two friends had been imprisoned in a tiny hiding-place, separated from the hearth by a thin iron sliding-panel, which, when the soldiers lit their fire, had grown red hot.  The gentleman of the party was already badly burned, and the women were nearly suffocated.  The gendarmes kicked away the fire, the panel was pushed back, and the duchess, pale and fainting, came forth and surrendered.  The commander of the troops was sent for.  To him she said:  “General, I confide myself to your honor.”  He answered, “Madame, you are under the safeguard of the honor of France.”

This capture was a great embarrassment to the Government.  Pity for the devoted mother, the persecuted princess, the brave, self-sacrificing woman, stirred thousands of hearts.  The duchess was sent at once to an old chateau called Blaye, on the banks of the Gironde, the estuary formed by the junction of the Dordogne and the Garonne.  Tradition said that the old castle had been built by the paladin Orlando (or Roland), and that he had been buried within its walls after he fell at Roncesvalles.

In this citadel the Duchesse de Berri was confined, with every precaution against escape or rescue; and the restraint and monotony of such a life soon told upon a woman of her character.  She could play the heroine, acting well her part, with an admiring world for her audience; but “cabined, cribbed, confined” in an old, dilapidated castle, her courage and her health gave way.  She was cheered, however, at first by Legitimist testimonies of devotion.  Chateaubriand wrote her a memorable letter, imploring her, in the name of M. de Malesherbes, his ancestor who had defended Louis XVI., to let him undertake her defence, if she were brought to trial; but the reigning family of France had no wish to proceed to such an extremity.  The duchess had not come of a stock in which all the women were sans reproche, like Marie Amelie.  Her grandmother, Queen Caroline of Naples, the friend of Lady Hamilton and of Lord Nelson, had been notoriously a bad woman; her sister, Queen Christina of Spain, had made herself equally famous; and doubts had already been thrown on the legitimacy of the son of the duchess, the posthumous child of the Duc de Berri.  The queen of France, who was almost a saint, had been fond of her young relative for her many engaging qualities; and what to do with her, in justice to France, was a difficult problem.

To the consternation and disgust of the Legitimists, the heroine of La Vendee dropped from her pedestal and sank into the mire.  “She lost everything,” says Louis Blanc,—­“even the sympathy of the most ultra-partisans of the Bourbon dynasty; and she deserved the fate that overtook her.  It was the sequel to the discovery of a terrible secret,—­a secret whose publicity became a just punishment for her having, in pursuit of her own purposes, let loose on France the dogs of civil war.”