The Prince de Conti told me at Barcelona that the Duchesse d’Orleans had assured him that, even had the Duc d’Orleans survived, he never could have attained, his object.  The immense sums he had lavished upon the horde of his revolutionary satellites had, previous to his death, thrown him into embarrassment.  The avarice of his party increased as his resources diminished.  The evil, as evil generally does, would have wrought its own punishment in either way.  He must have lived suspected and miserable, had he not died.  But his reckless character did not desert him at the scaffold.  It is said that before he arrived at the Place de Greve he ate a very rich ragout, and drank a bottle of champagne, and left the world as he had gone through it.

The supernumerary, the uncalled-for martyr, the last of the four devoted royal sufferers, was beheaded the following spring.  For this murder there could not have been the shadow of a pretext.  The virtues of this victim were sufficient to redeem the name of Elizabeth

[The eighteen years’ imprisonment and final murder of Mary, Queen of Scots, by Elizabeth of England, is enough to stigmatize her forever, independently of the many other acts of tyranny which stain her memory.  The dethronement by Elizabeth of Russia of the innocent Prince Ivan, her near relation, while yet in the cradle, gives the Northern Empress a claim to a similar character to the British Queen.]

from the stain with which the two of England and Russia, who had already borne it, had clouded its immortality.  She had never, in any way, interfered in political events.  Malice itself had never whispered a circumstance to her dispraise.  After this wanton assassination, it is scarcely to be expected that the innocent and candid looks and streaming azure eyes of that angelic infant, the Dauphin, though raised in humble supplication to his brutal assassins, with an eloquence which would have disarmed the savage tiger, could have won wretches so much more pitiless than the most ferocious beasts of the wilderness, or saved him from their slow but sure poison, whose breath was worse than the upas tree to all who came within its influence.

The Duchesse d’Angouleme, the only survivor of these wretched captives, is a living proof of the baleful influence of that contaminated prison, the infectious tomb of the royal martyrs.  That once lovely countenance, which, with the goodness and amiableness of her royal father, whose mildness hung on her lips like the milk and honey of human kindness, blended the dignity, grace, elegance, and innocent vivacity, which were the acknowledged characteristics of her beautiful mother, lost for some time all traces of its original attractions.  The lines of deep-seated sorrow are not easily obliterated.  If the sanguinary republic had not wished to obtain by exchange the Generals La Fayette, Bournonville, Lameth, etc., whom Dumourier had treacherously consigned into the hands of Austria, there is little:  doubt but that, from the prison in which she was so long doomed to vegetate only to make life a burthen, she would have been sent to share the fate of her murdered family.