The "body" was mere bare and shattered bones; the "high and mighty Prince," the broken fragments of a soldier's carcase; not a word to recall the catastrophe, not a word of blame or grief in this epitaph carved by a sorrowing family; a prodigious result of the respect which the century shows to the works and susceptibilities of the Revolution! In the same way, no time was lost in removing all traces of the mortuary chapel of the Duc de Berry. What a sum total of annihilation! Bourbons, who returned to so little purpose to your palaces, you have busied yourselves with naught save exhumations and funerals: your time of life was passed. God has willed it so! The ancient glory of France perished beneath the eyes of the shade of the Great Condé, in a moat at Vincennes: perhaps at the very place where Louis IX., "to whom men resorted as to a saint.... seated himself at the foot of an oak, and where all who had any business with him came without ceremony and without hindrance from any usher or others; and whenever he heard anything that could be amended in the speeches of those who pleaded for others he most graciously corrected it himself, and all the people who had a cause to bring before him stood round him[626]." The Duc d'Enghien asked leave to speak to Bonaparte: "he had a cause to bring before him;" he was not heard! Who, standing at the edge of the ravelin, looked down into the moat upon those muskets, those soldiers dimly lighted by a lantern in the mist and gloom, as in night everlasting? Where was the light placed? Did the Duc d'Enghien stand over his open grave? Was he obliged to step across it to place himself at the distance of "six paces" specified by the Duc de Rovigo. There exists a letter written by M. le Duc d'Enghien, at the age of nine, to his father the Duc de Bourbon; he says: "All the Enguiens[627] are _lucky_; the one[628] of the Battle of Cerizoles, the one who won the Battle of Rocroi[629]: I hope to be so too." Is it true that the victim was refused a priest? Is it true that he only with difficulty found a hand willing to convey to a woman a last pledge of affection? What did the executioners care for sentiments of religion or love? They were there to kill, the Duc d'Enghien to die. The Duc d'Enghien had been secretly married, through the offices of a priest, to the Princesse Charlotte de Rohan[630]: in those days of a roving mother-land, a man, by the very reason of his elevation, was impeded by a thousand political obstacles; to enjoy that which society accords to all, he was obliged to hide himself. This lawful marriage, to-day no more a secret, enhances the splendour of a tragic doom; it substitutes the glory for the clemency of Heaven: religion perpetuates the pomp of misfortune when, after the catastrophe has been accomplished, the cross rises on the deserted spot. * [Sidenote: The Duc de Talleyrand.]