heresa, and sister to Marie Antoinette. This lady
was not one who inspired respect, but she had some good qualities.
She was a good mother to her children, and had plenty of ability.
Of course she hated the French Revolution, and everything that
savored of what are called liberal opinions. Her career, which
was full of vicissitudes and desperate plots, ended by her being
dismissed ignominiously from Naples by the English ambassador,
and she went to end her days with her nephew at Vienna.

Marie Amelie used sometimes to tell her children how she had wept
when a child for the death of the little dauphin, the eldest son
of Louis XVI., who, before the Revolution broke out, was taken
away from the evil to come. She was to have been married to him
had he lived. When older, she had an early love-affair with her
cousin, Prince Antoine of Austria; but he was destined for the
Church, and the youthful courtship came to an untimely end. When
she first met her future husband, she and her family were living in
a sort of provisional exile in Palermo. The princess was twenty-seven,
Louis Philippe was ten or twelve years older, and they seem to have
been quite determined to marry each other very soon after their
acquaintance began. It was not easy to do so, however, for the
duke, as we have seen, was at that period too much a republican
to suit even an English Admiral; but the princess declared that
she would go into a convent if the marriage was forbidden, and
on Dec. 25, 1809, she became the wife of Louis Philippe.

No description could do justice to the purity and charity of this
admirable woman; and in her good works she was seconded by her
sister-in-law, Madame Adelaide, and by her daughter.

"The queen," her almoner tells us, "had 500,000 francs a year for
her personal expenses, and gave away 400,000 of them." "M. Appert,"
she would say to him, "give those 500 francs we spoke of, but put
them down upon next month's account. The waters run low this month;
my purse is empty." An American lady, visiting the establishment
of a great dressmaker in Paris, observed an old black silk dress
hanging over a chair. She remarked with some surprise: "I did not
know you would turn and fix up old dresses." "I do so only for
the queen," was the answer.

The imposture, ingratitude, and even insolence of some of Marie
Amelie's petitioners failed to discourage her benevolence. For
instance, an old Bonapartist lady, according to M. Appert, one da