370 The King of the French, [Oc/r. 



Twelfth, without Isstie. The death of Henry the Third, formerly 

 Duke of Anjou> and King of Poland, brother of Charles the Ninth, 

 that atrocious author of the massacre of St, Bartholomew, left the 

 crown to the Bourbon branch. 



In 1589, Henry Bourbon, King of Navarre, the famous Henry the 

 Fourth, was called to the throne. He was allied to the Capets, as ninth 

 in descent from St. Louis, and was at once a Valois by blood, arid a 

 Bourbon by parentage. The death of the unfortunate Louis the Six- 

 teenth on the scaffold, in 1793, left France without a monarch, as she 

 had left herself without a throne. 



In 1804, Napoleon, the First Consul, was made Emperor, and 

 retained his sovereignty till 1814, when he abdicated for the first time, 

 and returning, Was finally expelled in 1815. The Bourbons then 

 returned. The fatal ordonnances of the 27th of June, 1830, overthrew 

 them, and the Orleans branch were again summoned to the throne, 

 (August 7th,) by the general acclamation of the people, and the sanc- 

 tion of the Chamber of Deputies. 



The History.of the late Duke of Orleans, the father of the King, is 

 one of warning to the restlessness and folly of men of rank. He had 

 fortune, high station, and extensive popularity ; he had even personal 

 acquirements and no trivial ability. But he had ambition ; a giddy, 

 reckless, and cruel desire of being the first, \vhere nature, fidelity, and 

 honour would have kept him the second. Yet it is remarkable that he 

 lost his grand prize, the throne, by want of vice ! Personally profligate, 

 and publicly ready for all excesses of politics or the passions, he 

 was not prepared to exhibit the due proportion of ferocity. He had 

 not made up his mind to drink blood, and roar blasphemies with the 

 true men of the revolution. The Marats outran him in frenzy, the 

 Dantons in blasphemy, and the Robespierres in massacre. Thus left 

 behind in the popular race of the glorious time of philosophy and the 

 scaffold, the unfortunate Duke stood a solitary and forlorn figure for the 

 scoff of the Republic-^-soon to be its victim. The old question of who 

 or what was the true origin of that tempest of horror and carnage, is 

 brought to decision in the character of the Duke of Orleans. He was 

 the ricliest subject in France :- the King was oppressed with financial 

 perplexities. He was at the head of all the intellectual profligates of 

 France: the King was surrounded only by the court imbeciles, by 

 feeble adulators, keen enough in their own interests to keep him con- 

 stantly iri the clouds, whenever the public interests were concerned, but 

 utterly unfit to contend, in intelligence, experience, or activity, with 

 the World of France. The Duke was a man of ability ^ the King was, 

 like his councillors, imbecile, though not, like them, dishonest; and 

 destitute of all opportunities to learn the public mind, though not, like 

 them, unwilling. With all those advantages oh the side of Orleans, 

 advantages, to a man of his unprincipled spirit, galling him every hour 

 by the contrast, he had a personal and keener source of resentment : he 

 felt that he was suspected by the King, and hated by the Queen. 



The private scandals of French life must find another detail than 

 ours. But they had reached a dreadful extent in the time of the old 

 court of France. The Queen's artless manners had given rise to 

 suspicions of more than levity, and in the infinite idleness of Versailles, 

 and the infinite malice of Paris, she had been traduced without mercy. 

 There is not the slightest evidence that she was deserving of the slightest 



