d then the
people who called him in, hooted him out. His life had been attempted
many times. All the other kings hated him and refused to let their
daughters marry his sons. He and his sons were waiting at Claremont
while the talkers in Paris talked their loudest.

There was a third bone of contention--the Imperial line. At this time
the champions of this morsel were at the summit; for a Bonaparte was
riding on the top of the revolutionary scrimmage.

By the death of the great Napoleon's only child, the second son of his
third brother became the recognised claimant to the Imperial crown.

For France has long ceased to look to the eldest son as the rightful
heir. There is, in fact, a curse on the first-born of France. Napoleon's
son, the King of Rome, died in exile, an Austrian. The Duc de Bordeaux,
born eight years after him, never wore the crown, and died in exile,
childless. The Comte de Paris, born also at the Tuileries, was exiled
when he was ten years old, and died in England. All these, of one
generation. And of the next, the Prince Imperial, hurried out of France
in 1870, perished on the Veldt. The King of Rome lies in his tomb at
Vienna, the Duc de Bordeaux at Goritz, the Comte de Paris at Weybridge,
the Prince Imperial at Farnborough. These are the heirs of France, born
in the palace of the Tuileries. How are they cast upon the waters of the
world! And where the palace of the Tuileries once stood the pigeons now
call to each other beneath the trees, while, near at hand, lolls on
the public seat he whom France has always with her, the vaurien--the
worth-nothing.

So passes the glory of the world. It is not a good thing to be born in a
palace, nor to live in one.

It was in the Rue Lafayette that John Turner had his office, and when
he emerged from it into that long street on the evening of the 25th
of August, 1850, he ran against, or he was rather run against by, the
newsboy who shrieked as he pattered along in lamentable boots and waved
a sheet in the face of the passer: "The King is dead! The King is dead!"

And Paris--the city that soon forgets--smiled and asked what King?

Louis Philippe was dead in England, at the age of seventy-seven, the
bad son of a bad father, another of those adventurers whose happy
hunting-ground always has been, always will be, France.

John Turner, like many who are slow in movement, was quick in thought.
He perceived at once that the death of Louis Philippe left the field