We are told that in his early youth Joseph Philippe d’Orléans gave promise of an estimable manhood. How wofully this promise was belied by his after-life and shameful and tragic death we know. He was born at St. Cloud in 1747, and married, in 1769, the only daughter of the Duc de Penthièvre—a creature endowed with every charm of person and mind to make her at once reverenced and loved. Philippe was tall, slight, and well proportioned, his features finely cut and lit up with vivacity and intelligence, his manners gracious and dignified. Such is the portrait handed down to us of him in those early days before the shadow of coming infamy had obscured the picture. He fell soon into habits of unbridled dissipation; but, so long as he confined himself to this, to mad charioteering pranks on the boulevards, and aerial escapades in balloons, with boon companions as mad as himself, the people looked on in contemptuous disapproval. It was necessary, in order to stimulate this passive feeling to one of direct antagonism, that he should interfere with the popular pleasure and convenience. This he did by turning his broad and richly planted garden into a huge shop, thus depriving the _bourgeois_ and idlers of Paris of their accustomed resort on the sultry days and long mellow evenings of summer. His royal highness had contrived very soon to compromise a fortune more than royal in its extent; and, in order to replenish his coffers, he decided to cut down his ancestral chestnuts, and build up in their place long rows of shops, to be hired out at a high rent to tradespeople. The fashionables and the _bourgeois_, and, more important than all in a Frenchman’s eyes, the children, were thus driven to promenade under a stone colonnade, instead of enjoying the green shade of Richelieu’s groves, where the buzz of a multifarious bazaar had replaced the cooing of doves and the twitter of singing-birds. By-and-by we see the thermometer rising from resentful dislike to fierce hatred. Philip is smitten with Anglomania, and spends his time and, what is of more consequence to Paris, his money in London. He wears only London-made coats, drives English horses, hires English grooms, altogether affects the ways and manners of _outre-mer_, to the great disgust of Versailles and the boulevards. Wretched Philip! well had it been for him and for Versailles had he dwelt content in these puerile masquerades and self-degrading follies! But under the frivolous surface there lay a substratum of cruel vindictiveness, a bristling self-love, that was quick to see an affront, and implacable in avenging it. Marie Antoinette had the dire ill-luck to offend her disreputable cousin of Orleans. When her brother, the Archduke Maximilian, came to see her at Versailles, the queen, then in her twentieth year, very naturally desired to see as much as possible of this dear companion of her childhood during his short stay; so she dispensed, as far as she could,