And so the years again passed on and other changes were at hand. Prayers, penances, and sufferings such as Louise de Condé had endured, and sufferings which had been borne also in various other ways by so many holy souls among the French emigrants, had brought down mercy from God on their unhappy country and on Europe. The long war was at an end, the muskets _had_ fallen from the soldiers' hands, and Napoleon was a captive. Louis XVIII. sat once more on the throne of his father. The _fleur de lis_ again floated from the tower of the Louvre. Madame Royale, who had been sent out of France as a prisoner, ransomed by treaty, came back to hold the court over which her mother had once presided; the princes of the blood-royal hastened back to their places, and there was a general wish that Louise de Condé should be once more on her native soil. Ah! what a lifetime of sorrow had she passed through since she left Chantilly and her house in the Rue Monsieur, and even now she would not return to _them_. No, never again could she come back to be the princess. If she returned to France, it must be as the religious to reestablish a convent of her order, and thus aid in bringing back religious life to France. It must be confessed that rarely was a person more fitted for the task. None should rule, says a proverb, but those who have learned to obey, and obedience had been a task which the princess had well studied. {119} She had passed through three novitiates, and she had in her lifetime seen the management of eight different convents, and she had known well how to profit by the knowledge she gained. Accordingly she quitted the convent at Heath the 16th of August, 1814, and arrived in Paris just as all were preparing to keep the _fête_ of St. Louis for the first time for many years. She resided for a time in the house of her brother, the Duc de Bourbon; but she never quitted the apartments allotted to her, and lived in the utmost retirement, waiting there only till a suitable convent could be assigned to her. The papers of the day, after mentioning her arrival in Paris, added: "It was the _on dit_ that his majesty proposed to revive a royal foundation in her favor, and to establish her with her sisters in a magnificent monastery which would be restored to its primitive destination. Already it was sad to think that the church of this abbey had been used for profane purposes, and the friends of religion and of art would joyfully see this edifice restored. It would be purified by establishing there the perpetual adoration, and by placing there a shining example of piety in the person of a princess devoted in an especial manner to God's service."