The sudden and tragic death of _Madame_, Henriette d'Angleterre, wife of the king's brother, Monsieur, le Duc d'Orléans, made famous by Bossuet's funeral oration, long ascribed to poison, has been elucidated by Littré in what has been designated as the finest example known of "a retrospective medical demonstration." She had just returned from England, bearing with her the treaty of Dover, signed by her brother, Charles II, in which that monarch agreed to abandon the alliance with Holland, and died suddenly in great agony after taking her usual glass of chicory-water in the evening. The autopsy, which was performed by the most celebrated surgeons of France, aided by two or three English physicians, revealed a small perforation in the walls of the stomach, which the doctors, knowing no other way of accounting for, agreed must have been made accidentally by the point of their scissors. Littré demonstrates that this accident was very improbable, and that the perforation was evidently caused by an ulcer of the stomach,--a disease unknown to the medical science of the time. [Illustration: END-OF-CENTURY TYPE. By F. Fournery.] Louis XIV was preceded to the tomb by his only son, the dauphin, in April, 1711; by the Duc de Bourgogne, become dauphin in February, 1712, his wife having died six days before; by the Duc de Bretagne, eldest of the sons of the Duc de Bourgogne, three weeks after his parents; by the Duc de Berry, grandson of the king, on the 4th of May, 1714. Such a succession of calamities roused the gravest suspicions, and the Duc d'Orléans, afterward regent, openly accused of the use of poison, seriously contemplated demanding permission of the king to constitute himself prisoner till these calumnies should be silenced. There remained only a young prince, the Duc d'Anjou, son of the Duc de Bourgogne and Marie-Adélaide de Savoie, five years old at this date, and so delicate that his life was despaired of. He, however, lived to become Louis XV. Louis XIV, after having declared his sons by the Marquise de Montespan, the Duc du Maine and the Comte de Toulouse, heirs to the crown in default of princes of the blood, and making them members of the Council of the Regency, died September 1, 1715, at the age of seventy-seven.