hough intellectually
wide apart from them, the duke had one, if not two traits in common with
both; his utter contempt for money affairs and the personal charm he
wielded. I doubt whether this personal charm in the other two men was
due to their intellectual attainments; with the Duc d'Orleans it was
certainly not the case. He rarely, if ever, said anything worth
remembering; in fact, he frankly acknowledged his very modest
scholarship, and his inability either to remember the epigrams of others
or to condense his thoughts into one of his own. "I should not like to
admit as much to my father, who, it appears, is a very fine Greek and
Latin scholar," he said--"that is, if I am to believe my brothers, De
Nemours and D'Aumale, who ought to know; for, notwithstanding the prizes
they took at college, I believe they are very clever. Ah, you may well
look surprised at my saying, 'notwithstanding the prizes they took,'
because I took ever so many, although, for the life of me, I could not
construe a Greek sentence, and scarcely a Latin one. I have paid very
handsomely, however, for my ignorance." And then he told us an amusing
story of his having had to invent a secretaryship to the duchess for an
old schoolfellow. "You see, he came upon me unawares with a slip of
paper I had written him while at college, asking him to explain to me a
Greek passage. There was no denying it, I had signed it. What is worse
still, he is supposed to translate and to reply to the duchess's German
correspondence, and, when I gave him the appointment, he did not know a
single word of Schiller's language, so I had to pay a German tutor and
him too."

I have said that the Duc d'Orleans was absolutely indifferent with
regard to money, but he would not be fleeced with impunity. What he
disliked more than anything else, was the greed of the shopkeeping
bourgeois. One day, while travelling in Lorraine, he stopped at the
posting-house to have his breakfast, consisting of a couple of eggs, a
few slices of bread and butter, and a cup of coffee. Just before
proceeding on his journey, his valet came to tell him that mine host
wanted to charge him two hundred francs for the repast. The duke merely
sent for the mayor, handed him a thousand-franc note, gave him the
particulars of his bill of fare, told him to pay the landlord according
to the tariff, and to distribute the remainder of the money among the
poor. It is more than probable that mine host was among the f