Memoirs of the Courts of Louis XV and XVI. Being secret memoirs of Madame Du Hausset, lady's maid to Madame de Pompadour, and of the Princess Lamballe — Complete eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 532 pages of information about Memoirs of the Courts of Louis XV and XVI. Being secret memoirs of Madame Du Hausset, lady's maid to Madame de Pompadour, and of the Princess Lamballe — Complete.

Memoirs of the Courts of Louis XV and XVI. Being secret memoirs of Madame Du Hausset, lady's maid to Madame de Pompadour, and of the Princess Lamballe — Complete eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 532 pages of information about Memoirs of the Courts of Louis XV and XVI. Being secret memoirs of Madame Du Hausset, lady's maid to Madame de Pompadour, and of the Princess Lamballe — Complete.

These presentiments of the awful result of impending storms were mutual.  From frequent conversations with the Princesse de Lamballe, from the evidence of her letters and her private papers, and from many remarks which have been repeated to me personally by Her Highness, and from persons in her confidence, there is abundant evidence of the forebodings she constantly had of her own and the Queen’s untimely end.

[A very remarkable circumstance was related to me when I was at Vienna, after this horrid murder.  The Princess of Lobkowitz, sister to the Princesse de Lamballe, received a box, with an anonymous letter, telling her to conceal the box carefully till further notice.  After the riots had subsided a little in France, she was apprised that the box contained all, or the greater part, of the jewels belonging to the Princess, and had been taken from the Tuileries on the 10th of August.

It is supposed that the jewels had been packed by the Princess in anticipation of her doom, and forwarded to her sister through her agency or desire.]

There was no friend of the Queen to whom the King showed any deference, or rather anything like the deference he paid to the Princesse de Lamballe.  When the Duchesse de Polignac, the Comtesse Diane de Polignac, the Comte d’Artois, the Duchesse de Guiche, her husband, the present Duc de Grammont, the Prince of Hesse-Darmstadt, etc., fled from Paris, he and the Queen, as if they had foreseen the awful catastrophe which was to destroy her so horribly, entreated her to leave the Court, and take refuge in Italy.  So also did her father-in-law, the Duc de Penthievre; but all in vain.  She saw her friend deprived of De Polignac, and all those near and dear to her heart, and became deaf to every solicitation.  Could such constancy, which looked death in its worst form in the face unshrinking, have existed without great and estimable qualities in its possessor?

The brother-in-law of the Princesse de Lamballe, the Duc d’Orleans, was her declared enemy merely from her attachment to the Queen.  These three great victims have been persecuted to the tomb, which had no sooner closed over the last than the hand of Heaven fell upon their destroyer.  That Louis XVI. was not the friend of this member of his family can excite no surprise, but must rather challenge admiration.  He had been seduced by his artful and designing regicide companions to expend millions to undermine the throne, and shake it to pieces under the feet of his relative, his Sovereign, the friend of his earliest youth, who was aware of the treason, and who held the thunderbolt, but would not crush him.  But they have been foiled in their hope of building a throne for him upon the ruin they had made, and placed an age where they flattered him he would find a diadem.

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Memoirs of the Courts of Louis XV and XVI. Being secret memoirs of Madame Du Hausset, lady's maid to Madame de Pompadour, and of the Princess Lamballe — Complete from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.