He left a will leaving his claims (such as they were) to the imperial throne of France to his young cousin Victor Napoleon, thus overlooking the father of that young prince, Jerome Napoleon, the famous Plon-Plon.

The reconciliation which in 1873 took place between the Comte de Chambord and his distant cousins of the house of Orleans never resulted in cordial relations, though the Comte de Paris, as his cousin’s heir, visited the Comte de Chambord at Froehsdorf.  The Comtesse de Chambord despised and disliked the family of Orleans, and the Monarchist party in France still remained divided into Legitimists and Orleanists, the latter protesting that they only desired a constitutional sovereign, and did not hold to the doctrine of right divine.

The Comte de Chambord died Aug. 24, 1883.  His malady was cancer in the stomach, complicated by other disorders.  The Orleanist princes hastened to Froehsdorf to attend his funeral, but they were so disdainfully treated by his widow that they deemed it due to their self-respect to retire before the obsequies.  This is how “Figaro,” a leading Legitimist journal in Paris, speaks of the Comte de Chambord:—­

“He had noble qualities and great virtues.  What most distinguished him was an intense feeling of royal dignity, which he guarded most jealously by act and word.  But we may be permitted to doubt whether the fifty-three years he had passed in exile had qualified him to understand and to sympathize with the great changes in public opinion in his own country, and the true tendencies of the present and the rising generation.  In his youth he was entirely guided by others, but after the coup d’etat of 1851 he took things into his own hands, and directed his course up to the last moment with a firmness which admitted of neither contradiction nor dispute.  He sincerely wished to promote liberty; there was nothing in him of the despot, but he had lived all his life out of France, and could not comprehend the preferences and the habits which had grown into national feeling.  He was kindly, genial, intelligent, witty, dignified, and affable.  He only needed to have been brought up among his people to have made an admirable sovereign.  Had the first plan of the Revolution of 1830 been carried out, and the young prince been made king, with Louis Philippe lieutenant-general till his majority, it is possible that France might have been spared great tribulations.  For our own part,” continues the “Figaro,” “we have always looked upon monarchy as the best government for the peace, prosperity, and liberty of France; but with the personal politics of the Comte de Chambord we could not agree.  After all France had gone through, it was necessary to nationalize the king, and to royalize the nation.  M. le Comte de Chambord utterly refused to yield anything to constitutional ideas and to become what he called the king of the Revolution.  It is true that the White Flag of the Bourbons had been associated with