“The king led me into the next room.  I fell on his neck.  We were unhappy together.  Our irreparable loss was common to us both, and I suffered as much for him as for myself.  There was a crowd in that little room.  I wept and talked wildly, and I was beside myself.  I recognized no one but the unhappy Marshal Gerard, the extent of whose misfortune I then understood.[1] After a few minutes they said that all was ready.  The body had been placed on a stretcher covered with a white cloth.  It was borne by four men of the house, attended by two gendarmes.  They went out through the stable-yard; there was an immense crowd outside....  We all followed on foot the inanimate body of this dear son, who a few hours before had passed over the same road full of life, strength, and happiness....  Thus we carried him, and laid him down in our dear little chapel, where four days before he had heard mass with the whole family.”

[Footnote 1:  Marshal Gerard was then mourning for his son.]

The death of the Duke of Orleans was the severest blow that could have fallen on Louis Philippe, not only as a father, but as head of a dynasty.  The duke left two infant sons,—­the Comte de Paris and the Duc de Chartres.  The former is now both the Orleanist and Legitimist pretender, to the French throne.

In the early part of 1845 Louis Philippe, who had already visited Windsor and been cordially received there, was visited in return at his Chateau d’Eu by Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, accompanied by Lord Aberdeen, then English Minister for Foreign Affairs.  The king’s reception of the young queen was most paternal.  He kissed her like a father, and did everything in his power to make her visit pleasant.  Among the subjects discussed during the visit was the question of “the Spanish marriages.”

The unfortunate Queen of Spain, Isabella II., was just sixteen years old; her sister, the Infanta Luisa, was a year younger.  Isabella was the daughter of a vicious race, and with such a mother as she had in Queen Christina, she had grown up to early womanhood utterly ignorant and untrained.  One of her ministers said of her that “no one could be astonished that she had vices, but the wonder was that she had by nature so many good qualities.”  Jolly, kindly, generous, a rebel against etiquette, and an habitual breaker of promises, she was long popular in Spain, in spite of a career of dissoluteness only equalled by that of Catherine of Russia.

In 1846, however, she had not shown this tendency, and in the hands of a good husband might have made as good a wife and as respectable a woman as her sister Luisa has since proved.

There were many candidates for the honor of Queen Isabella’s hand.  Louis Philippe sent his sons D’Aumale and Montpensier to Madrid to try their fortunes; but England objected strongly to an alliance which might make Spain practically a part of France.  The candidature of the French princes was therefore withdrawn.