little. However
affected M. le Duc d'Orleans might be, consolation soon came. The yoke
to which he had submitted himself, and which he afterwards found heavy,
was severed. Above all, he was free from all annoyance on the score of
Rion's marriage, and its results, annoyance that would have been all the
greater, inasmuch as at the opening of the poor princess she was found to
be again enceinte; it was also found that her brain was deranged. These
circumstances were for the time carefully hidden. It may be imagined
what a state Rion fell into in learning at the army the death of Madame
la Duchesse de Berry. All his romantic notions of ambition being
overturned, he was more than once on the point of killing himself, and
for a long time was always kept in sight by his friends. He sold out at
the end of the campaign. As he had been gentle and polite to his
friends, they did not desert him. But he ever afterwards remained in
obscurity.
On account of this death the theatres were closed for eight days.
On Saturday, the 22nd of July, the heart of Madame la Duchesse de Berry
was taken to the Val-de-Grace.
On Sunday, the 23rd of July, her body was carried in an eight-horse coach
to Saint-Denis. There was very little display; only about forty torches
were carried by pages and guards.
The funeral service was performed at Saint-Denis in the early part of
September. There was no funeral oration.
Madame de Saint-Simon had been forced, as I have shown, to accept the
post of lady of honour to Madame la Duchesse de Berry, and had never been
able to quit it. She had been treated with all sorts of consideration,
had been allowed every liberty, but this did not console her for the post
she occupied; so that she felt all the pleasure, not to say the
satisfaction, of a deliverance she did not expect, from a princess
twenty-four years of age. But the extreme fatigue of the last days of
the illness, and of those which followed death, caused her a malignant
fever, which left her at death's portal during six weeks in a house at
Passy. She was two months recovering herself.
This accident, which almost turned my head, sequestered me from anything
for two months, during which I never left the house, scarcely left the
sick-chamber, attended to nothing, and saw only a few relatives or
indispensable friends.
When my wife began to be re-established, I asked M. le Duc d'Orleans for
a lodging at the new chateau at Meudon. He lent me the whol
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