France in the Nineteenth CenturyLatimer, Elizabeth Wormeley
History
France in the Nineteenth Century
Latimer, Elizabeth Wormeley
France -- History -- 1789-1900
There was certainly no proof that Madame de Feuchères had had any
hand in the murder of the old man who had plotted to escape from
her, and who had expressed to others his dread of the tyranny she
exercised over him; but there was every ground for strong suspicion,
and the public lost no time in fastening part of the odium that
attached to the supposed murderess on the king, whose family had
so greatly benefited by her influence over the last head of the
house of Condé. She retained her ill-gotten wealth, and removed
at once to Paris. She had been engaged in stock operations for
some time, and now gave herself up to them, winning enormous sums.
The new throne was sadly shaken by these events, added to discontents
concerning the king's prudent policy of non-intervention in the
attempted revolutions of other countries, which followed that of
France in 1830 and 1831. The next very interesting event of this
reign was the escapade and the discomfiture of the young Duchesse
de Berri.
About the close of 1832, while France and all Europe were still
experiencing the after-shocks which followed the Revolution of
July, Marie Caroline, the Duchesse de Berri, planned at Holyrood
a descent upon France in the interests of the Duc de Bordeaux,
her son.[1] Had he reigned in consequence of the deaths of his
grandfather and uncle, Charles X. and the Duc d'Angoulême, the
duchess his mother was to have been regent during his minority.
She regretted her inaction during the days of July, when, had she
taken her son by the hand and presented him herself to the people,
renouncing in his name and her own all ultra-Bourbon traditions
and ideas, she might have saved the dynasty.
[Footnote 1: Louis Blanc and papers in "Figaro."]
[Illustration: MARIE CAROLINE FERDINANDE LOUISE, DUCHESSE DE BERRY.
Née à Naples, le 5 Novembre 1798.]
Under the influence of this regret, and fired by the idea of becoming
another Jeanne d'Albret, she urged her plans on Charles X., who
decidedly disapproved of them; but "the idea of crossing the seas
at the head of faithful paladins, of landing after the perils and
adventures of an unpremeditated voyage in a country of knights-errant,
of eluding by a thousand disguises the vigilance of enemies through
whom she had to pass, of wandering, a devoted mother and a banished
queen, from hamlet to hamlet and from château to château, appealing
to human nature high and low on its romantic side, and at the end of
a victorious conspiracy unfurling in France the ancient standard of
the monarchy, was too dazzling not to attract a young, high-spirited
woman, bold through her very ignorance, heroic through mere levity,
able to endure anything but depression and _ennui_, and prepared to
overbear all opposition with plausible platitudes about a mother's
love."[1]
[Footnote 1: Louis Blanc, Histoire de Dix Ans.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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