The Duchess of Berry had the double gift of pleasing and making herself loved.  All the persons of her household, all her servitors, from the great nobles and great ladies to the domestics and the chamber-maids, were deeply devoted to her.  Poor or rich, she had attentions for all.  Listen to the Count de Mesnard:—­

“Madame is incessantly making presents to all who approach her.  At New Year’s her apartments are a veritable bazaar furnished from all the shops of Paris; her provision, made from every quarter, is universal, from bon-bons to the most precious articles—­ everything is there.  Madame has thought of each specially; the people of her own service are not forgotten any more than the ladies and officers of her household; father, mother, children, every one, is included in the distribution.  The royal family naturally comes first; next, the numerous relatives of the Palais Royal, of whom she is very fond; then her family at Naples, which is also numerous; and finally all of us, masters and servants, we all have our turn.”

No one, we think, has made a more exact portrait of the Duchess of Berry than the Count Armand de Pontmartin, who is so familiar with the Restoration.  In his truthful and lively Souvenirs d’un vieux critique, how well he presents “this flower of Ischia or of Castellamare, transplanted to the banks of the Seine, under the gray sky of Paris, to this Chateau des Tuileries, which the revolutions peopled with phantoms before making it a spectre.”

How really she was “this good Duchess, so French and so Neapolitan at once, half Vesuvius, half school-girl, whom nothing must prevent us from honoring and loving.”  The chivalric and sentimental rhetoric of the time, the elegies of the poets, the noble prose of Chateaubriand, the tearful articles of the royalist journals, have condemned her to appear forever solemn and sublime.  It was sought to confine her youth between a tomb and a cradle.  But as M. de Pontmartin so finely remarks:  “At the end of two or three years her true nature appears beneath this artificial drapery.  Amusements recommence, distractions abound.  The Princess is no longer a heroine; she is a sprite.  The beach of Dieppe sings her praises better, a thousand times better, than the chorus of courtiers.  She loves pleasure, but she wishes every pleasure to be a grace or a benefit.  She creates a mine of gold under the sand of the Norman coast; she pacifies political rancor and soothes the wounds of the grumblers of the Grand Army.  She makes popular the name of Bourbon, which had suffered from so much ingratitude.  The Petit-Chateau, as her delightful household was called, renews the elegant manners, the exquisite gallantries of the court of Anne of Austria, and offers to the romancers the models of which Balzac, later, made so much too free use.  There I see our amiable Duchess in her true element, not on the kind of Sinai on which the writers of the white flag have perched her, prodigal in their imitations of Bossuet,—­between Jeanne d’Arc and Jeanne Hachette, between Valentine de Milan and the Widow of Malabar.”