The youngest daughter of the ducal pair, Sophie Charlotte, had been first betrothed to Ludwig the Second of Bavaria; but the King jilted his cousin in the most heartless fashion, and she afterward married Ferdinand d’Alençon, an uncle of Louis Philippe of France. Banished from France with the rest of the house of Orleans, the Duke and Duchess spent their time travelling from place to place, and Sophie was sickly and discontented, a victim to fits of melancholia. By his death on the fourteenth of November, 1888, good Duke Max was spared the tragedy of Mayerling, where his favorite grandson and the hope of the Austrian Empire, Rudolf of Hapsburg, met with a violent and mysterious death three months later. On the twenty-fourth of January, 1890, the Duchess Ludovica was seized with an attack of influenza at her palace in Munich, which developed into pneumonia. The physicians at once pronounced her condition serious on account of her advanced age, and the absent daughters were telegraphed for. Sophie was already in Munich, as were the three sons. The next afternoon the Duchess grew so much worse that the sacrament was administered; but in spite of the evident approach of death the indomitable old lady refused to go to bed. She insisted upon remaining in the reclining chair which she had occupied from the beginning of her illness, and where she soon sank into unconsciousness, passing away quietly at four o’clock in the morning, surrounded by children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, at the age of eighty-three. The death of the Duchess Ludovica was an irreparable loss to her family. They had leaned on her in joy as in sorrow, and as long as she lived she had held them together, widely scattered as they were, with a firm and loving hand. Her children’s troubles and pleasures had been her own, and their devotion, her joy and reward. Chapter XV Conclusion After the funeral of the Duchess Ludovica, Maria Sophia returned to Paris, where the ex-King of Naples had bought a residence some years before, and where they were living very quietly, seeing no one but old friends or relatives. Her grief at her mother’s loss was deep and sincere, and for a time she was inconsolable. For her it meant the severing of all the old ties and associations; and henceforth she rarely visited the home of her childhood. A few months later Hélène of Thurn and Taxis died after a long and painful illness, at the age of fifty-eight. The Empress Elizabeth had hastened to her and was with her when she died, but none of the three younger sisters were able to be present.