The princess gladly set out from Vienna in May, and on the 4th of June she was met at the gates of Mittau by Louis XVIII., his wife, and the Duc d’Angoulême. It was a touching meeting, memories of the past crowding up and dimming the happiness of the present, while rendering it more sacred. Not only her relatives, but loyal nobles of France and faithful servants of her father received Madame Royale at Mittau. Of these the most notable was the Abbé Edgeworth, who had attended Louis XVI. on the scaffold. The princess was, at her own request, left alone with the abbé, that she might learn from him the details of her father’s last moments. She ever cherished for the good man the warmest regard, and when, some years after, a dangerous fever broke out at Mittau and numbered him among its victims, it was Madame Royale who took her place by his bedside, closed his dying eyes, and followed his remains to the grave. The thought that lay uppermost in the minds of all when the first emotions of meeting were over, was the permanent union of Madame Royale to her family by her marriage with the Duc d’Angoulême. Where the wishes of all parties were at one, there was no need for delay. On the 10th of June, six days after the princess’s arrival, the marriage ceremony took place in the gallery of the ducal castle. Loving hands had decked the altar with branches of lilac and summer flowers, and here, in a strange land, in the presence of the little court of Louis XVIII., the prince and princess plighted their troth. It was the fulfilment of a vow rather than the consummation of a love match, and the faith was plighted to the dead as much as to the living. We have lingered so long over Madame Royale’s early life that we have no space to do more than glance at the years which immediately followed her marriage. In 1801 the exiles were obliged, through the caprice of the Czar, to quit Mittau in the depth of a severe winter. They appealed to the King of Prussia for a refuge, and he appointed Warsaw, where they remained some years. In 1805 they were again at Mittau. In 1808 they came to England. Here for two years they resided at Gosfield Hall, a seat of the Marquis of Buckingham in Essex, and here, in November, 1810, Louis XVIII. lost his Queen. They then removed to Hartwell Hall, a fine Elizabethan house between Oxford and Aylesbury, which they occupied until the year 1814. Some memories of the Duchess of Angoulême at Hartwell have been preserved. She is described as reserved and sad, and averse to the notice or attention of strangers. But she would often be seen standing in the porch of the little church a silent spectator of the Protestant service, and she expressed to the minister her pleasure at the reverence and fitness which characterised the English mode of worship.