In the funeral oration on Henrietta of England we find little of history, still less of politics. Here we have a domestic catastrophe of appalling suddenness: a brilliant woman, the worshiped centre of the most brilliant court, one to whom the speaker himself was most tenderly attached, so abruptly snatched away by death that the suspicion of foul play at once arose and has not to this day been entirely dispelled. Nowhere has Bossuet, nor perhaps any other orator, so powerfully depicted the uncertainty of everything human. The closeness with which he treated his subjects is well illustrated by an anecdote that is connected with this oration. Only two or three hours before her death, when already conscious of her desperate position, the unfortunate princess had directed that an emerald ring of hers should be after her death handed to the great preacher. "What a pity," he was told, "that such an incident cannot find place in a funeral oration!"--"Why not" he answered. When he delivered the oration, the emerald ring was on one of the fingers of his right hand; and when speaking of the princess's virtues and charming qualities, he alluded to the art of giving, in which she signally excelled. "And this art," he went on, "never deserted her, not even, _I know it_, in the throes of death," at the same time raising his right hand and placing the precious jewel in full view of the audience. The funeral oration on the Prince de Condé shows us how he triumphed over difficulties. He was a warm friend and ardent admirer of the Prince, and at the same time a devoted subject of the King, rebellion against whom he considered a very grievous sin. Yet the Prince had for years been a rebel against the King during the wars of the Fronde, and had continued in the ranks of the hostile Spaniards even after all the other rebels had submitted to the royal authority. After conducting his narrative down to the time when the Prince, still a faithful subject, was unjustly imprisoned by order of Cardinal Mazarin,--"And," he goes on, "since I have to speak of these things over which I would fain keep eternally silent, until this fatal imprisonment he had not even dreamed that anything could be attempted against the State.... This is what made him say (I certainly can repeat here, before these altars, the words I received from his lips, since they so clearly show the bottom of his heart)--he said then, speaking of this unfortunate prison, that he had entered it the most innocent, and had left it the guiltiest of men." Nearly the whole of this oration is devoted to history; it teems with brilliant passages, the most famous of which is the narrative of the Prince's first victory, the battle of Rocroi, in 1643.