uccessive opinions, the Duke of
Montmorency deserved general esteem. His profound piety, his unchanging
gentleness, his exhaustless charity, made him a veritable saint. He was
the complete type of the Christian nobleman. His name, his character,
the very features of his countenance, were all in perfect harmony. The
adversaries of the Revolution could not refrain from honoring this good
man. On receiving the title of governor to the Duke of Bordeaux, he
felt rewarded for the devotion and virtue of his whole life. But he
regarded this grave employment as a heavy burden, "an immense and
formidable honor, the terror of his feebleness, and the perpetual
occupation of his conscience." This was the thought expressed in his
reception discourse at the French Academy. The Count Daru replied to
him. At the same session M. de Chateaubriand read a historic fragment.
It was the first time since leaving the ministry that the celebrated
writer had appeared in public, and he chose to do so to adorn the
triumph of him whose rival he had been.

The Duke Mathieu de Montmorency died six months before he was to enter
upon his functions as governor to the Duke of Bordeaux. It was Good
Friday of the year 1826, at three o'clock in the afternoon. Before the
tomb in the Church of Saint Thomas Aquinas, his parish, the Duke was
praying like a saint, when suddenly he was seen to waver, and then to
fall. Those near him ran to him, raised him; he was dead. The news had
hardly spread when the church was filled with a crowd of poor people,
who wept hot tears over the loss of their benefactor. On the morrow the
Duchess of Broglie wrote to Madame REcamier, for whom the deceased had
had an almost mystic tenderness:--

"Holy Saturday. Oh, my God! my God! dear friend, what an event! I think
of you with anguish. All the past comes up before me. I thought I could
see the grief of my poor mother, and I think of yours, my dear friend,
which must be terrible. But what a beautiful death! Thus he would have
chosen it--the place, the day, the hour! The hand of God, of that
saviour God, whose sacrifice he was celebrating, is here!"

Father Macarthy said, in a sermon preached in the Chapel of the
Tuileries:--

"Happy he, O God, who comes before Thy altar, on the day of Thy death,
at the very hour when Thou didst expire for the salvation of the world,
to breathe out his soul at Thy feet, and be laid in Thy tomb!"

Lastly, the Duke de Laval-Montmorency wrote to Mad