gentleman to whom Lafayette was speaking exclaimed, "If
any one had told me this but yourself, General, I would not have
believed it."

Lafayette merely answered, "It was really so,"--a proof, thinks
the narrator, how fiercely the fire of revolution still burned
in the old man's soul.

The last months of Louis XVIII.'s life were embittered by changes
of ministry from semi-liberal to ultra-royalist, and by attempts
of the officers of the Crown to prosecute the newspapers for
free-speaking. He died, after a few days of illness and extreme
suffering, Sept. 15, 1824, and was succeeded by the Comte d'Artois,
his brother, as Charles X. This was the third time three brothers
had succeeded each other on the French throne.

Charles X. was another James II., with cold, harsh, narrow ideas
of religion, though religion had not influenced his early life
in matters of morality. He was, as I have said, a widower, with
one remaining son, the Duc d'Angouleme, and a little grandson, the
son of the Duc de Berri. His two daughters-in-law, the Duchesse
d'Angouleme and the Duchesse de Berri, were as unlike each other
as two women could be,--the one being an unattractive saint, the
other a fascinating sinner.

Charles X. was not like his brother,--distracted between two policies
and two opinions. He was an ultra-royalist. He believed that to the
victors belong the spoils; and as Bourbonism had triumphed, he wanted
to stamp out every remnant of the Revolution. Constitutionalism,
the leading idea of the day, was hateful to him. He is said to have
remarked, "I had rather earn my bread than be a king of England!"
He probably held the same ideas concerning royal prerogative as
those of his cousin, the king of Naples, expressed in a letter
found after the sack of the Tuileries in 1848.

"Liberty is fatal to the house of Bourbon; and as regards myself,
I am resolved to avoid, at any price, the fate of Louis XVI. My
people obey force, and bend their necks; but woe to me if they
should ever raise them under the impulse of those dreams which sound
so fine in the sermons of philosophers, and which it is impossible
to put in practice. With God's blessing, I will give prosperity
to my people, and a government as honest as they have a right to
expect; but I will be a king,--and that _always!_"

Charles X. was on the throne six years. He was a fine-looking man
and a splendid horseman,--which at first pleased the Parisians,
who had been disgusted wi