Lafayette, during his visit to America in 1824, expressed himself freely about the Bourbons.  “France cannot be happy under their rule,” he said;[1] “and we must send them adrift.  It would have been done before now but for the hesitation of Laffitte.  Two regiments of guards, when ordered to Spain under the Duc d’Angouleme, halted at Toulouse, and began to show symptoms of mutiny.  The matter was quieted, however, and the affair kept as still as possible.  But all was ready.  I knew of the whole affair.  All that was wanted to make a successful revolution at that time was money.  I went to Laffitte; but he was full of doubts, and dilly-dallied with the matter.  Then I offered to do it without his help.  Said I:  ’On the first interview that you and I have without witnesses, put a million of francs, in bank-notes, on the mantelpiece, which I will pocket unseen by you.  Then leave the rest to me.’  Laffitte still fought shy of it, hesitated, deliberated, and at last decided that he would have nothing at all to do with it.”

[Footnote 1:  Vincent Nolte, Fifty Years in Two Hemispheres.]

Here the gentleman to whom Lafayette was speaking exclaimed, “If any one had told me this but yourself, General, I would not have believed it.”

Lafayette merely answered, “It was really so,”—­a proof, thinks the narrator, how fiercely the fire of revolution still burned in the old man’s soul.

The last months of Louis XVIII.’s life were embittered by changes of ministry from semi-liberal to ultra-royalist, and by attempts of the officers of the Crown to prosecute the newspapers for free-speaking.  He died, after a few days of illness and extreme suffering, Sept. 15, 1824, and was succeeded by the Comte d’Artois, his brother, as Charles X. This was the third time three brothers had succeeded each other on the French throne.

Charles X. was another James II., with cold, harsh, narrow ideas of religion, though religion had not influenced his early life in matters of morality.  He was, as I have said, a widower, with one remaining son, the Duc d’Angouleme, and a little grandson, the son of the Duc de Berri.  His two daughters-in-law, the Duchesse d’Angouleme and the Duchesse de Berri, were as unlike each other as two women could be,—­the one being an unattractive saint, the other a fascinating sinner.

Charles X. was not like his brother,—­distracted between two policies and two opinions.  He was an ultra-royalist.  He believed that to the victors belong the spoils; and as Bourbonism had triumphed, he wanted to stamp out every remnant of the Revolution.  Constitutionalism, the leading idea of the day, was hateful to him.  He is said to have remarked, “I had rather earn my bread than be a king of England!” He probably held the same ideas concerning royal prerogative as those of his cousin, the king of Naples, expressed in a letter found after the sack of the Tuileries in 1848.