the chamber at once, and supplicated him to return to Paris.  At last he consented.  He wished me to remain and give orders, and begged, with much positiveness, Madame de Saint-Simon to be present when seals were put upon the effects, after which I led him to his coach, and he went away.  I immediately repeated to Madame de Saint-Simon the orders he had given me respecting the opening of the body, in order that she might have them executed, and I hindered her from remaining in the chamber, where there was nothing now but horror to be seen.

At last, about midnight, on the 21st of July, 1819, Madame la Duchesse de Berry died, ten days after Chirac had consummated his crime.  M. le Duc d’Orleans was the only person touched.  Some people grieved; but not one of them who had enough to live upon appeared ever to regret her loss.  Madame la Duchesse d’Orleans felt her deliverance, but paid every attention to decorum.  Madame constrained herself but little.  However affected M. le Duc d’Orleans might be, consolation soon came.  The yoke to which he had submitted himself, and which he afterwards found heavy, was severed.  Above all, he was free from all annoyance on the score of Rion’s marriage, and its results, annoyance that would have been all the greater, inasmuch as at the opening of the poor princess she was found to be again enceinte; it was also found that her brain was deranged.  These circumstances were for the time carefully hidden.  It may be imagined what a state Rion fell into in learning at the army the death of Madame la Duchesse de Berry.  All his romantic notions of ambition being overturned, he was more than once on the point of killing himself, and for a long time was always kept in sight by his friends.  He sold out at the end of the campaign.  As he had been gentle and polite to his friends, they did not desert him.  But he ever afterwards remained in obscurity.

On account of this death the theatres were closed for eight days.

On Saturday, the 22nd of July, the heart of Madame la Duchesse de Berry was taken to the Val-de-Grace.

On Sunday, the 23rd of July, her body was carried in an eight-horse coach to Saint-Denis.  There was very little display; only about forty torches were carried by pages and guards.

The funeral service was performed at Saint-Denis in the early part of September.  There was no funeral oration.

Madame de Saint-Simon had been forced, as I have shown, to accept the post of lady of honour to Madame la Duchesse de Berry, and had never been able to quit it.  She had been treated with all sorts of consideration, had been allowed every liberty, but this did not console her for the post she occupied; so that she felt all the pleasure, not to say the satisfaction, of a deliverance she did not expect, from a princess twenty-four years of age.  But the extreme fatigue of the last days of the illness, and of those which followed death, caused her a malignant fever, which left her at death’s portal during six weeks in a house at Passy.  She was two months recovering herself.