of Beresina, deserved to be called the “saviour of the army.”  He was wounded at the close of the Russian campaign.  Then his young wife crossed all Europe to go and care for him and saved him.  She was but twenty.  She was only twenty-four when Louis XVIII. named her lady of honor to the Duchess of Berry.  Despite her extreme youth, she filled her delicate functions with exquisite tact and precocious wisdom, and from the first exercised a happy influence over the mind of the Princess, who gladly listened to her counsels.  Very active in work, the lady of honor busied herself with untiring zeal with the details of her charge.  She was the directress, the secretary, the factotum, of the Duchess of Berry.  The Abbe Tripied, who pronounced her funeral eulogy at Bar-le-Duc, May 21st, 1868, traced a very lifelike portrait of her.  Let us hear the ecclesiastic witness of the high virtues of this truly superior woman.

“She bore,” he said, “with equal force and sagacity her titles of lady of honor and Duchess of Reggio.  Proud of her blason, where were crossed the arms of the old and of the new nobility, and where she saw, as did the King, a sign, as it were, of reconciliation and peace, she bore it high and firm, and defended it in its new glories, against insulting attacks.  An ornament to the court, by her graces and her high distinction, she displayed there, for the cause of the good, all the resources of her mind and the riches of her heart.  But none of the seductions and agitations she met there disturbed the limpidity of her pure soul.  Malignity, itself at bay, was forced to recognize and avow that in the Duchess of Reggio no other stain could be found than the ink-stains she sometimes allowed her pen to make upon her finger.  In her greatness, this noble woman saw, before all, the side of duty.”

In 1832, when the Duchess of Berry was imprisoned in the citadel of Blaye, her former lady of honor asked, without being able to obtain that favor, the privilege of sharing her captivity.  The Duchess of Reggio to the last set an example of devotion and of all the virtues.  She was so gracious and affable that one day some one remarked:  “When the Duchess gives you advice, it seems as if she were asking a service of you.”  When the noble lady died, April 18th, 1868, at Bar-le-Duc, where her good works and her intelligent charity had made her beloved, they wished to give her name to one of the streets of the city, and as they already had the Rue Oudinot and the Place Reggio, one of the streets was called the Rue de La Marechale.

The lady of the bedchamber of the Duchess of Berry and her lady companions all belonged to the old aristocracy.  The Countess of Noailles, lady of the bedchamber, a woman full of intelligence, and very beautiful, a mother worthy of all praise, was the daughter of the Duke de Talleyrand, the niece of the Prince de Talleyrand, the wife of Count Just de Noailles, second son of the Prince of Poix.