sents this, to all appearance, very deliberate act of usurpation in behalf of his master as the result of fortuitous circumstances. He had met General Sebastiani, who apprised him of the King's flight, but was unable to give any information with respect to Napoleon; whereupon he had proposed that they should proceed to the Post-Office to obtain the desired intelligence. Count Ferrand, the reigning postmaster, seeing, as he believed, the enemy advancing to take possession, had voluntarily retired. On the pretext that in case of any tumult the cash-boxes might be pillaged, Count Lavalette had requested General Dessolier, commander-in-chief of the National Guard, to send a piquet of soldiers, who were placed in charge of the building; and lastly, he had issued a permis de postes, or order for post-horses, to M. de Ferrand, who, although the Count insisted that he was not displacing him, was afraid to trust himself, his wife, and his family on their proposed journey, or flight, to Ghent without this official protection. The innocent colouring which is attempted to be thrown on all these proceedings in the memoirs is very awkwardly laid on, and leaves such glaring inconsistencies in the narrative, that the reader is compelled to shake his head and pronounce this effort at self-whitewashing completely unsuccessful. It is not to be wondered at if, after the final catastrophe which for ever sealed the doom of Napoleon, and safely established the throne of the Bourbons, as far as Bonapartism was concerned, Lavalette should have been one of the first in that long list of proscription which Fouché and Talleyrand are said to have drawn up in concert for the gratification of their new masters. The only wonder is, that he did not follow the example of so many others, and take to immediate flight. Of the two chief reasons given by the Count for his not doing so-consciousness of innocence, and unwillingness to leave a wife in weak health, and within not many months of her confinement-the latter alone has the slightest appearance of common sense. It is true it was difficult to anticipate that nothing but his death would satisfy the vindictive feelings of the restored Bourbons; yet he might be certain that his sentence would be a severe one, and long separate him from her, his affection for whom he professes to have been the motive. for braving out the dangers of his position. One cannot help, however uncharitably, suspecting Lavalette of having been blinded, not only by a want of ordinary judgment, but by that fatal vanity of heroism which formed part the cant of those days. It seems otherwise impossible to imagine that he should have so deliberately invoked his fate as to have written a letter to Talleyrand, explaining his conduct on the occasion already referred to, and demanding a trial. His wish was promptly satisfied; for a few days after, while seated at table with his wife, an inspector of police presented himself, inviting him to an interview with M. de Cazes, the then Prefect of Police. A hackney coach was in waiting, which Lavalette entered with the inspector and four of his friends, at the sight of whom the true character of his position was unmistakably impressed upon him. No interview with M. de Cazes took place at all; but on arriving at the

Prefecture, the Count was immediately consigned to a cell, which he only quitted to be transferred to the Conciergerie, where he was now to await his trial; and, according to the usages of French justice, all communication with the outer world, save through his gaolers, was denied him for six weeks. This is called being au secret, and its object is to sift out the secrets of the accused, by leaving all the threads of his existence in the broken state produced by his arrest, and giving him no opportunity of destroying the scent. Marshal Ney was in the same prison, and occupied the cell immediately above that of Lavalette; and the two prisoners, persecuted in the same cause, but not equally fortunate, alternately took their exercise in the same courtyard, but were never allowed to do so at the same time, though Ney was always accompanied by a gendarme. Once, by the connivance of the sentinel, who had served under the marshal, the prisoners communicated, when Ney gave vent to the vain hopes he entertained of being rescued from his impending fate. At another stolen interview, which took place shortly afterwards between them, all these illusions had vanished, and the brave soldier calmly contemplated the doom that awaited him. "Labédoyère," he said, "is gone first. It will be your turn next, my dear Lavalette, and then mine."

The sufferings of the prisoner, tortured by the vicissitudes of hope and misgiving as to his own fate, were increased tenfold by anxiety for that of his wife. Madame de Lavalette had given birth to a son; but the infant only survived a few weeks, leaving the mother bereft of those maternal joys which might have afforded some compensation for the wretchedness of her position, and plunged in unrelieved despondency. Fearing the consequences of the mental impression the horror and gloom of a prison might produce, Lavalette had refused to allow his wife to visit him during her pregnancy, and the same reasons made him resist the desire to embrace his infant son. It was not until after his sentence had been pronounced that Madame Lavalette visited her husband. The Princess de Vaudemont and Madame de Vaudeuil, both devoted friends of Lavalette, undertook at his request the painful duty of conveying the terrible news to her. They had not to speak, for their appearance, attired in mourning, at once told her the whole truth. The Princess de Vaudemont, remarkable for the firmness of her character, did not allow the unhappy wife to abandon herself to all the wild grief prompted by nature, but made her sit down at once and write to the Duke de Duras, the first gentleman of the bedchamber, to obtain an interview with the King. The wives of Labédoyère and Ney had been sternly refused an audience to plead for their husbands, and scarcely any hope remained that Madame de Lavalette would be more fortunate. However, contrary to all expectation, an hour after the delivery of this letter an answer was received with the intimation, "The King awaits in his closet Madame de Lavalette." Accompanied by the Princess and her daughter, a girl of fifteen, she presented herself at the Tuileries, and was led by the hand into the presence of the King by the Duke de Duras. As she knelt at

the feet of Louis XVIII. he said, "Madame, I have received you at once (d'abord) to give you a token of all my interest." He said no more. But ambiguous as his words were, they quickly circulated among the crowd of courtiers as an undoubted promise of pardon; and as Madame Lavalette retired, her grief, the beauty and grace of her person, and the remembrance that she was of a noble family, rendered it but natural that she should have succeeded in touching the King's heart. But those softening impressions that could touch a courtier's heart were yet not strong enough, as the event proved, to affect the stuff of which that of Louis XVIII. was made. It was the day after this interview that Madame de Lavalette first visited her husband since his arrest and imprisonment; and now, after five months' absence, and the dreadful trials that had filled up the interval, the husband who opened his arms to her was doomed to the scaffold. Her voice failed her under the violent commotion of her feelings, and more than an hour elapsed ere she could recover sufficient command of her faculties to narrate the incidents of her audience with the King. A few days sufficed to dissipate the hope which the royal words had raised with such apparently useless cruelty. Layalette had appealed, according to the usual form, to the Court of Cassation. It was in this interval, on the 7th of December, that Marshal Ney was executed. When his fellow-prisoner heard his fate, he asked whether he had died on the scaffold, and on being informed that it had been a military execution, he exclaimed, to the astonishment of the gaoler who conveyed the information, "Happy man!" On the 20th of December the Court of Cassation confirmed the judgment of the tribunal which had condemned Lavalette, and now but three days remained for a final appeal to the royal clemency. The Duke of Ragusa took upon himself to contrive an opportunity for Madame de Lavalette to throw herself once more at the feet of the King. He sent General Foy to her, who conducted her to the entrance of the Galerie de Diane, where she found the marshal, who took her under his arm and read her the memorial she was to present to the King, who was then with all his court at Mass in the chapel of the Tuileries, and would pass through the gallery on his way back to his apartments. A few moments before the King's appearance one of the attendants recognised Madame de Lavalette, and insisted on her withdrawal; but the Duke of Ragusa as firmly insisted she should remain, when an officer of the palace was sent for, who repeating the order in the most peremptory manner that the unfortunate petitioner should not remain, the Duke informed him that he would take all upon himself. While this altercation was proceeding the King appeared, and considering it too late to order the removal of Madame de Lavalette, which might occasion a painful scene from her resistance, he steadily advanced towards her; and as she fell at his feet, he took the papers she presented from her hand, and saying, "Madame, I can do nothing but my duty," passed on. Madame de Lavalette had another memorial for the Duchess of Angoulême, and her kind protector, seeing her hesitate, urged

her to run after the princess; but seeing her advance, M. d'Agoult, in attendance on the princess, turned round, and extending both his arms, arrested all further progress. This new form of answer from the King left no shred of hope in the Count's breast, who now thought only of some pretext to get his wife and daughter away for two days, when all would be over. Madame de Lavalette, however, had not interpreted the King's language so fatally, and still cherished a hope that the Duchess of Angoulême might be prevailed on to use her intercession. Quitting the mourning garb in which she had appeared before the King, she had herself conveyed to the Tuileries, and presented herself at the apartments of the princess as an ordinary visitor. Her haggard and grief-worn looks, however, betrayed her, and she was refused admittance. In vain she tried another and another entrance; every where she was recognised and repulsed, till at last, exhausted, she seated herself on the stone steps of the courtyard, and there remained an image of forlorn hope and an object of deep pity to all who passed in and out of the palace, though none dared testify their compassion. At last, utterly vanquished by the blank hopelessness of all her efforts, she returned broken-hearted to her husband's cell.

And now it was that the plan of escape was conceived and matured by the friends of Lavalette, which was dependent in its execution on the devotion and firm self-possession of his wife. That copious but not always correct chronicler, the Duchess d'Abrantes, attributes the entire merit and credit of the escape to the Princess de Vaudemont, who, she asserts, had to use the most persistent efforts to overcome the helpless apathy of Madame de Lavalette, and rouse her to the only course of action which could now save her husband's life. The present writer takes the liberty to disbelieve the story altogether. No doubt the princess was of essential service in plotting and planning the details of the whole affair, and also in impressing minutely on the mind of Madame de Lavalette exactly how her part was to be played; and, to one bewildered with grief, such help and inspiration were no doubt much needed. Beyond so much as can be thus interpreted, the tale is an idle one. Had not Madame de Lavalette exerted the most extraordinary control over her shattered nerves, the strength for which could only have been drawn from the depth of her devoted affection, the plan must have broken down in the first half-hour of its attempted execution. But to proceed with the narrative. Only two days remained ere the sentence would be carried out, when, at six o'clock, Madame de Lavalette, accompanied by her relative, Madlle. Dubourg, came to dine with the prisoner. As soon as they were alone, she said it was but too evident all hope of a pardon was gone, and there was now only one resource left, which she had come to propose. He must attire himself in her habiliments, and leave the prison with her cousin. A sedan chair would be waiting for him, in which he would be conveyed to the Rue des Saints Pères, where he would find a friend with a cabriolet, who would drive him to a hiding-place which had been prepared for him, and

where he might await in security until he could be smuggled out of France. At first the enterprise appeared to Lavalette utterly wild and hopeless. There were too many turnkeys about; he could not disguise himself sufficiently well to deceive the gate-keeper, who was in the habit of leading out Madame de Lavalette by the hand. His wife replied,

"Make no objections; if you die, I die. Do not therefore reject my proposal. I have a deep conviction we shall succeed; I feel that God is sustaining me." Still Lavalette hesitated. He dreaded the ridicule of being recaptured and dragged through the streets in women's clothes; but still more he feared the brutal treatment his wife might receive from his gaolers when it was discovered that he had fled. Perceiving, however, that as he continued in this strain of objection his wife's face grew paler, and her trembling frame betrayed that her agony of mind was becoming uncontrollable, he saw that he must yield; and promising to do all that she desired, merely pointed out that the cabriolet should be placed nearer at hand, as his flight would be soon discovered, and he would infallibly be overtaken in his sedan chair ere the place appointed was reached. It was agreed that this part of the plan should be changed; and his wife having once more exacted a promise from him that he would obey her in every thing, she left the prison in a comparatively calm state of mind.

It appears that, on the same evening after parting with her husband, Madame de Lavalette made another attempt to obtain her husband's pardon through the Duke de Richelieu, then Minister of Foreign Affairs, with whom, by stratagem partly, and partly by obstinacy, she obtained an interview. She rapidly stated her husband's case, and forcibly demonstrated the injustice of his sentence. The duke listened with evident emotion, but told her that the King had forbidden strictly any further mention of the case to him. She then urged the minister to present another memorial to the King from herself. This the duke promised, pledging his word that if it were sent to him at eight the next morning, it should be placed in the King's hands at once. Before Madame de Lavalette retired to rest, the lawyer had to be visited, to draw out the memorial. In the morning she informed her husband how she had still been employed in his behalf, and that the memorial was then in the hands of the King. "Nevertheless," she added, "my plan shall be executed this evening; it will be too late to-morrow, since we hear nothing from the palace. I will come to dinner. Keep up all your firmness; you will need it. As for me, I have still courage left for another twenty-four hours-not a moment longer." She added with a deep sigh, "I am, besides, nearly dead with fatigue."

That the time was short appeared but too clearly when Lavalette received a hint that he might now, if he desired it, seek ghostly comfort. The day was passed in taking leave of an old friend and of his daughter, whose grief so unmanned him that he feared to keep her longer near him lest he should lose all nerve. At five o'clock Madame de Lavalette re