The duke pondered the fact that he was invited to return to Paris, not by an envoy from the restored king, but by an officer in the British navy. Still the prince resolved immediately to repair to Paris. Taking an affectionate farewell of his wife and their infant son, he embarked on board the English frigate, accompanied by a single servant, and on the eighteenth of May, 1814, entered his native city, from which he had so long been an exile. Louis XVIII. was already there, having returned to Paris in the rear of the bayonets and the batteries of foreign troops. It was his majesty's expressed wish that the Palais Royal, the hereditary mansion of the Orleans family, should be repaired and restored to its former owners. During the republican and imperial rule, its numerous and spacious apartments had been appropriated to private residences. The duke, upon arriving in Paris, availed himself of temporary accommodations in furnished apartments in the Rue Grange Bateliere. One of his first steps was to repair incognito to the home of his fathers. The Swiss servants who guarded the palace still wore the imperial livery. With some reluctance they yielded to the importunities of the stranger, and allowed him to penetrate the interior apartments. "As he approached the grand staircase, the recollections of his boyhood, the lustre of his ancient race, the agonies of mind he had endured since he last beheld that spot, and gratitude to that Providence which had spared him amidst such universal ruin, completely overwhelmed him, and, falling prostrate on the tesselated pavement, he imprinted a thousand kisses on the cold white marble, while tears gushing from his eyes indicated, while they relieved, the emotions with which he contended."[O] [Footnote O: Life and Times of Louis Philippe.] The next day the duke was presented to his majesty, Louis XVIII., at the Tuileries. As he approached the royal presence, the king advanced towards him, and said, "Your highness was a lieutenant-general in the service of your country twenty-five years ago, and you are still the same." The assumption adopted by Louis XVIII. that there had been no interruption of the Bourbon reign, and the attempt to blot from history the twenty-five most eventful years in the annals of France, deservedly excited both contempt and ridicule. An American writer of distinction says: "The unconquerable prejudices of the Bourbons, and their studied ignorance of the feelings of the country they were called to govern after an exile of twenty-five years, were the prognostics as well as the cause of their ultimate fall.