The Sicilian Court.--Retirement of the duke.--The Restoration.--The return to Paris.--Arrival in Paris.--Reception by the Bourbons.--Testimony of an American.--Pride of the Bourbons.--Madame de Genlis.--Triumphal advance of Napoleon.--Flight of Louis XVIII.--Signal triumph of Napoleon.--Retirement of the Bourbons.--Efforts of the Duke of Orleans.--Dejection of the Duke of Orleans.--Calumnies of the journals.--Return of the Bourbons to Paris.--The duke's possessions restored.--The duke returns to the Palais Royal.--Humanity of the Duke of Orleans.--The duke persecuted by the court.--Execution of Marshal Ney.--Again an exile.--Testimony of Madame de Genlis.--The princes in the national lyceums.--Democratic tendencies of the duke. The court of Ferdinand IV., one of the most worthless and corrupt of the old feudal dynasties, was maintained in Sicily by the army, the navy, and the purse of England. His Sicilian majesty received from the British Government an annual subsidy of four hundred thousand pounds sterling ($2,000,000), to support the dignity of his throne, and to pay for the troops which Sicily furnished England for her interminable warfare against the French Empire. The Duke of Orleans severely condemned the errors and follies continually developed by the reigning dynasty, and yet he found himself utterly powerless to remedy them. The queen was the ruling power at the court, and her prejudiced and impassioned nature was impervious to any appeals of reason. She knew very well that England did not loan her protection and lavish her gold upon the Sicilian Court from any love for that court, but simply from dread and hatred of the republican principles advocated by Napoleon. She, therefore, often treated the English with the utmost disdain. And yet, sustained by twenty thousand British troops upon the island, she trampled upon all popular rights, consigning, by arbitrary arrests, to the dungeon or to exile all who opposed her sway. "Against these violations of law, infringements of liberty, and manifestations of absolutism, the Sicilians rose with becoming firmness. The Duke of Orleans had long foreseen the approaching hurricane, the gathering wrath of an injured people; but finding his remonstrances vain, his principles of government almost directly contrary to those of his august mother-in-law, he retired from a court where there was no room for a virtuous counsellor, and, with his wife and her infant prince, lived in retirement a few miles from Palermo."[M] [Footnote M: Life and Times of Louis Philippe.]