subsisted between this illustrious pair is an
everlasting monument that honours their sex. The Queen used to say of
her, that she was the only woman she had ever known without gall. "Like
the blessed land of Ireland," observed Her Majesty, "exempt from the
reptiles elsewhere so dangerous to mankind, so was she freed by
Providence from the venom by which the finest form in others is
empoisoned. No envy, no ambition, no desire, but to contribute to the
welfare and happiness of her fellow creatures--and yet, with all these
estimable virtues, these angelic qualities, she is doomed, from her
virtuous attachment to our persons, to sink under the weight of that
affliction, which, sooner or later, must bury us all in one common
ruin--a ruin which is threatening hourly."

These presentiments of the awful result of impending storms were mutual.
From frequent conversations with the Princesse de Lamballe, from the
evidence of her letters and her private papers, and from many remarks
which have been repeated to me personally by Her Highness, and from
persons in her confidence, there is abundant evidence of the forebodings
she constantly had of her own and the Queen's untimely end.

[A very remarkable circumstance was related to me when I was at Vienna,
after this horrid murder. The Princess of Lobkowitz, sister to the
Princesse de Lamballe, received a box, with an anonymous letter, telling
her to conceal the box carefully till further notice. After the riots
had subsided a little in France, she was apprised that the box contained
all, or the greater part, of the jewels belonging to the Princess, and
had been taken from the Tuileries on the 10th of August.

It is supposed that the jewels had been packed by the Princess in
anticipation of her doom, and forwarded to her sister through her agency
or desire.]

There was no friend of the Queen to whom the King showed any deference,
or rather anything like the deference he paid to the Princesse de
Lamballe. When the Duchesse de Polignac, the Comtesse Diane de Polignac,
the Comte d'Artois, the Duchesse de Guiche, her husband, the present Duc
de Grammont, the Prince of Hesse-Darmstadt, etc., fled from Paris, he and
the Queen, as if they had foreseen the awful catastrophe which was to
destroy her so horribly, entreated her to leave the Court, and take
refuge in Italy. So also did her father-in-law, the Duc de Penthievre;
but all in vain. She saw her friend deprived of De Polignac,