The same kind of fascination is said to have attended him throughout his
career. He succeeded in various difficult family suits on questions of
honors and privileges; he had merely to appear in court to dispose the
judges in his favor. He at length became so popular that on one occasion,
when he appeared at the theater on recovering from a wound received in a
duel, the audience applauded him on his entrance. Nothing, it is said,
could have been in more perfect good taste and high breeding than his
conduct on this occasion. When he heard the applause, he rose in his box,
stepped forward, and surveyed both sides of the house, as if he could not
believe that it was himself they were treating like a favorite actor, or a
prince of the blood.
His success with the fair sex may easily be presumed; but he had too much
honor and sensibility to render his intercourse with them a series of cold
gallantries and heartless triumphs. In the course of his attendance upon
court, where he held a post of honor about the king, he fell deeply in love
with the beautiful Princess Julia, of Savoy Carignan. She was young,
tender, and simple-hearted, and returned his love with equal fervor. Her
family took the alarm at this attachment, and procured an order that she
should inhabit the Abbey of Montmartre, where she was treated with all
befitting delicacy and distinction, but not permitted to go beyond the
convent walls. The lovers found means to correspond. One of their letters
was intercepted, and it is even hinted that a plan of elopement was
discovered. A duel was the consequence, with one of the fiery relations of
the princess. Letorieres received two sword-thrusts in his right side. His
wounds were serious, yet after two or three days' confinement he could not
resist his impatience to see the princess. He succeeded in scaling the
walls of the abbey, and obtaining an interview in an arcade leading to the
cloister of the cemetery. The interview of the lovers was long and tender.
They exchanged vows of eternal fidelity, and flattered themselves with
hopes of future happiness, which they were never to realize. After repeated
farewells, the princess re-entered the convent, never again to behold the
charming Letorieres. On the following morning his corpse was found stiff
and cold on the pavement of the cloister!
It would seem that the wounds of the unfortunate youth had been reopened by
his efforts to get over the wall; that he had refrained from calling
assistance, lest he should expose the princess, and that he had bled to
death, without any one to aid him, or to close his dying eyes.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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