The Prince said one day to the Prefect:—­

“Decidedly, you do not love hunting.”

“But I might love it, my lord, if I had such an outfit.”

“That’s because you don’t know anything about it, my dear Puymaigre; when I was in England, hunting all alone in the marshes with my dog Belle, I enjoyed it much more than here.”

The Prefect thus concludes his description of life at Chantilly:—­

“Dinner was at six o’clock in the magnificent gallery where the souvenirs of the great Conde were displayed in all their pomp, and the eyes fell on fine pictures of the battles of Rocroy, Senef, Fribourg, and Nordlingen, inspiring some regret for the life led by the heir of so much glory.  After dinner society comedy was played on a very pretty stage, where the luxury of costumes was very great and the mise-en-scene carefully attended to; and this did not make the actors any better, although the little plays were tolerable.  But Madame de Feucheres wishing to play Alzire and to take the principal part, which she doled out with sad monotony, without change of intonation from the first line to the last, and with a strongly pronounced English accent, it was utterly ridiculous, and Voltaire would have flown into a fine passion had he seen one of his chefs-d’oeuvres mangled in that way.  Who could have told that this poor Prince, who, if he had neither the virtues nor the dignity proper to his rank, was nevertheless a very good fellow, would perish in 1830, in such a tragic manner?”

Charles X. had a long standing affection for the Duke of Bourbon.  On September 21st, 1824, he conferred on him at the same time as on the Duke of Orleans, the title of Royal Highness.  The last of the Condes was, besides, Grand Master of France.  This court function was honorary rather than real, and the Prince appeared at the Tuileries only on rare occasions.  Charles X. loved him as a friend of his childhood, a companion of youth and exile, but he had a lively regret to see him entangled in such relations with the Baroness of Feucheres.  The advice he gave him many times to induce him to break this liaison was without result.  Finally the King said:  “Let us leave him alone; we only give him pain.”  He never went to Chantilly, in order not to sanction by his royal presence the kind of existence led there by his old relation; and the Prince knowing the sentiments of his sovereign, gave him but few invitations, which were always evaded under one pretext or another.

People wondered at the time who would be the heirs of the immense fortune of the Condes, whose race was on the point of extinction.  The Prince’s mother was Charlotte-Elisabeth de Rohan-Soubise, and the Rohans thought themselves the natural heirs.  But such a combination would not have met the views of Madame de Feucheres, who, not content with having got from the Prince very considerable donations, counted on figuring largely in his will.