"The Duke of Berri," writes Chateaubriand, in the _Mémoires d'outre-Tombe_, "had had one of those liaisons which religion reproves, but which human frailty excuses. It may be said of him as the historian has said of Henri IV.: 'He was often weak, but always faithful, and his passions never seemed to have enfeebled his religion.' The Duke of Berri, seeking vainly in his conscience for something very guilty, and finding only a few weaknesses, wished, so to say, to collect them around his death-bed, to prove to the world the greatness of his contrition and the severity of his penance. He had a sufficiently just opinion of the virtue of his wife to confess to her his faults, and to fulfil, beneath her eyes, his desire to embrace those two innocent creatures, the daughters of his long exile. 'Let them be sent for,' cried the young princess; 'they are my children also.' When the Viscountess de Gontaut, who had not been told beforehand, seemed astonished, Madame (_i.e._ the Countess of Artois) noticed it, and said to her: 'She knows everything; she has been sublime!'" The rest of Chateaubriand's narrative, especially as regards the Duke of Berri's two daughters, corresponds closely enough with the one left by Dupuytren, whose style, somewhat expressive, somewhat emphatic for a man of science, is less copious, and also less magniloquent than that of the marvellous author of _Le Gênie du Christianisme_ and of the _Mémoires d'outre-Tombe_. What the prince chiefly thought of in his last moments was his murderer, Louvel. "Twenty times in the course of the fatal night," says Dupuytren, the famous physician, whose account of the scene was published not many years ago, "he cried out, 'Have I not injured this man? had he not some personal vengeance to exercise against me?' In vain did Monsieur repeat to him, with tears in his eyes: 'No, my son, you never injured, you never saw this man; he had no personal animosity against you.' The prince returned incessantly to this groundless idea, and, without being conscious of it, furnished by his public and repeated inquiries the best proof that he had not provoked the frightful calamity which had befallen him. With this first idea he constantly associated another--that of obtaining pardon for his assassin. During his long and painful agony the prince begged for it at least a hundred times, and did so more earnestly in proportion as he felt his end approaching. Thus, when the increasing gravity of the symptoms made him fear that he would not live long enough to see the king, he called out piteously, 'Ah! the king will not arrive. I shall not be able to ask him to forgive the man.' Soon afterwards he appealed turn by turn to Monsieur and to the Duke of Augoulême, saying to them, 'Promise me, father, promise me, brother, that you will ask the king to spare the man's life.' But when at last the king arrived, he no sooner saw his Majesty than, summoning all his strength, he cried