Again, in 1814, when the Emperor Alexander of Russia urged him to concede so much to the popular feeling as to call himself King of the _French_, and to omit from his style the words "_par la grâce de Dieu_" he answered: "Divine right is at once a consequence of religious dogma and the law of the country. By that law for eight centuries the monarchy has been hereditary in my family. Without divine right I am but an infirm old man, long an exile from my country, and reduced to beg an asylum. But by that right, the exile is King of France." [Illustration: De la Villevielle, Cambacérès, D'Aigre Feuille--A Promenade in the Palais Royal. (Paris, 1818.)] He wrote and said these "neat things" himself, not by a secretary. Among his happy sayings two have remained in the memory of Frenchmen: "Punctuality is the politeness of kings," and "Every French soldier carries a marshal's baton in his knapsack." He was, in short, a genial, witty, polite old gentleman, willing to govern France constitutionally, disposed to forget and forgive, and be the good king of the whole people. But he was sixty years of age, fond of his ease, and extremely desirous, as he often said, of dying in his own bed. He was surrounded by elderly persons who were bigoted to a Past which could not be resuscitated; and his brother, heir presumptive to the throne, was that fatal Comte d'Artois (Charles X.) who aggravated the violence of the Revolution of 1789, and precipitated that of 1830, by his total incapacity to comprehend either. Gradually the gloomy party of reaction and revenge who surrounded the heir presumptive gained the ascendency, and the good-natured old king could only restrain its extravagance enough to accomplish his desire of dying in his own house. Sincerely religious, he was no bigot; and it was not by his wish that the court assumed more and more the sombre aspect of a Jesuit seminary. It is doubtful if there would have been one exception to the amnesty of political offenses if Louis XVIII. had been as firm as he was kind. The reader sees a proof of his good-nature in the picture on the preceding page of Prince Cambacérès, who was Second Consul when Napoleon was First Consul, and Arch-chancellor under the Empire, peacefully walking in the streets of Paris with two of his friends. This caricature has a value in preserving an excellent portrait of a personage noted for twenty years in the history of France. [Illustration: Family of the Extinguishers--Caricature of the Restoration. (Paris, 1819.)]