During his eight years of emigration, the Duke of Doudeauville was constantly a prey to anxiety, grief, poverty, trials of every kind.  Thirteen of his relatives were put to death under the Terror.  His wife was imprisoned, and escaped the scaffold only through the 9th Thermidor.  He himself, having visited France clandestinely several times, ran the greatest risks.  In the midst of such sufferings his sole support was the assistance of a devoted servant.  “At the moment that I write these lines,” he says in his Memoirs, “I am about to lose my domestic Raphael, the excellent man who, for fifty years, has given me such proofs of fidelity, disinterestedness, and delicacy; I have treated him as a friend; I shall grieve for him as for a brother.”

Misfortune had fortified the character of the Duke of Doudeauville.  Unlike other emigres, he had learned much and forgotten nothing.  His attitude under the Consulate and the Empire was that of a true patriot.—­Without joining the Opposition, he wished no favor.  The sole function he accepted was that of councillor-general of the Department of the Marne, where he could be useful to his fellow-citizens without giving any one the right to accuse him of ambitious motives.  Nothing would have been easier for him than to be named to one of the high posts in the court of Napoleon, whose defects he disapproved, but whose great qualities he admired.  “Bonaparte,” he said in his Memoirs, “had monarchical ideas and made much of the nobility, especially that which he called historic.  I must confess, whatever may be said, that the latter under his reign was more esteemed, respected, feted, than it has been since under Louis XVIII. or Charles X. The princes feared to excite toward it and toward themselves the envy of the bourgeois classes, who would have no supremacy but their own.  Napoleon, on the contrary, having frankly faced the difficulty, created a nobility of his own.  Those who belonged to it, or hoped to, found it quite reasonable that they should be given as peers the descendants of the first houses of France.”  The Duchess of Doudeauville was a sister of the Countess of Montesquiou, who was governess of the King of Rome, and whose husband had replaced the Prince de Talleyrand as Grand Chamberlain of the Emperor.  Very intimate with the Count and Countess, the Duke of Doudeauville had some trouble in avoiding the favors of Napoleon, who held him in high esteem.  He found a way to decline them without wounding the susceptibilities of the powerful sovereign.

Under the Restoration, the Duke of Doudeauville distinguished himself by an honest liberalism, loyal and intelligent, with nothing revolutionary in it, and by an enlightened philanthropy that won him the respect of all parties.  When he was named as director of the post-office in 1822, many people of his circle blamed him for taking a place beneath him.  “Congratulate me,” he said, laughing, “that I have not been offered that of postman; I should have taken it just the same