chaff before the wind.  The Duc d’Angouleme, compelled to capitulate at Toulouse, sailed from Cette in a Swedish vessel.  The Comte d’Artois, the Duc de Berri, and the Prince de Conde withdrew beyond the frontier.  The King fled from the capital.  The Duchesse d’Angouleme, then at Bordeaux celebrating the anniversary of the Proclamation of Louis XVIII., alone of all her family made any stand against the general panic.  Day after day she mounted her horse and reviewed the National Guard.  She made personal and even passionate appeals to the officers and men, standing firm, and prevailing on a handful of soldiers to remain by her, even when the imperialist troops were on the other side of the river and their cannon were directed against the square where the Duchess was reviewing her scanty followers.

["It was the Duchesse d’Angouleme who saved you,” said the gallant General Clauzel, after these events, to a royalist volunteer; “I could not bring myself to order such a woman to be fired upon, at the moment when she was providing material for the noblest page in her history.”—­“Fillia Dolorosa,” vol. vii., p. 131.]

With pain and difficulty she was convinced that resistance was vain; Napoleon’s banner soon floated over Bordeaux; the Duchess issued a farewell proclamation to her “brave Bordelais,” and on the 1st April, 1815, she started for Pouillac, whence she embarked for Spain.  During a brief visit to England she heard that the reign of a hundred days was over, and the 27th of July, 1815, saw her second triumphal return to the Tuileries.  She did not take up her abode there with any wish for State ceremonies or Court gaieties.  Her life was as secluded as her position would allow.  Her favourite retreat was the Pavilion, which had been inhabited by her mother, and in her little oratory she collected relics of her family, over which on the anniversaries of their deaths she wept and prayed.  In her daily drives through Paris she scrupulously avoided the spot on which they had suffered; and the memory of the past seemed to rule all her sad and self-denying life, both in what she did and what she refrained from doing.

[She was so methodical and economical, though liberal in her charities, that one of her regular evening occupations was to tear off the seals from the letters she had received during the day, in order that the wax might be melted down and sold; the produce made one poor family “passing rich with forty pounds a year.”—­See “Filia Dolorosa,” vol. ii., p. 239.]

Her somewhat austere goodness was not of a nature to make her popular.  The few who really understood her loved her, but the majority of her pleasure-seeking subjects regarded her either with ridicule or dread.  She is said to have taken no part in politics, and to have exerted no influence in public affairs, but her sympathies were well known, and “the very word liberty made her shudder;” like Madame Roland, she had seen “so many crimes perpetrated under that name.”