the great battles of the tricolor flag.  When General Foy died, in November, 1825, the Duke of Orleans put his name for ten thousand francs to the subscription opened to provide a fund for the children of the General.  Some friendly representations were made from the Chateau to the Palais Royal on this matter.  It was answered that the Duke of Orleans had subscribed not as Prince, but as a friend, and in private called attention to the modesty of the gift compared with others, with that of M. Casimir Perier, for example, which amounted to fifty thousand francs.  This excuse was satisfactory at the Tuileries.

Is this saying that Louis-Philippe was already at this time thinking of dethroning his benefactor, his relative, and his King?  We think not.  He profited by the errors of Charles X.; but if Charles X. had not committed them, the idea of usurpation would not have occurred to the mind of the chief of the younger branch.  Men are not so profoundly good or so profoundly wicked.  They let themselves be carried further than they wish, and if the acts they are to commit some day were foretold them, the prophecies would most often seem to them as impossible as insulting.

Madame de Gontaut, Governess of the Children of France, recounts an incident that took place at the Louvre, December 22d, 1824, at the opening of the session of the Chambers:  “The crowd was prodigious.  The Dauphiness and the Duchess of Berry and Mademoiselle d’Orleans were present in one of the bays.  The Children of France were there.  The Duchess of Berry took the Duke of Bordeaux by her side.  The Duchess of Orleans called Mademoiselle, whom she loved tenderly, to her.  The canon announced the approach of the King.  At the moment of his appearance the hall resounded with acclamations.  The platform for the royal family was the one prepared for the late King; there had been left a slight elevation in it, that the King did not see, and he stumbled on it.  With the movement his hat, held on his arm, fell; the Duke of Orleans caught it.  The Duchess of Orleans said to me:—­

“‘The King was about to fall; my husband sustained him.’

“I answered:  ’No, Madame; Monseigneur has caught His Majesty’s hat.’

“The Dauphiness turned and looked at me.  We did not speak of it until six months after.  Neither of us had forgotten it.”

A few years more and Charles X. was to drop, not his hat, but his crown.

IX

THE PRINCE OF CONDE

At the time of the accession of Charles X., the family of Conde was represented only by an old man of sixty-eight, Louis-Henri-Joseph de Bourbon-Conde, born April 13th, 1756.  At the death of his father in 1818, he had taken the title of Prince of Conde, while retaining that of Duke of Bourbon, by which he had previously been designated.  On the 10th of January, 1822, he lost his wife, Princess Louise-Marie-Therese-Bathilde, sister of the Duke of Orleans, mother of the unfortunate Duke d’Enghien, and he lost, on March 10th, 1824, his sister, Mademoiselle de Conde, the nun whose convent of the Perpetual Adoration was situated in the Temple near the site of the former tower where Louis XVI. and his family had been confined.