race of God, and a good soldier by accident;
brave as a Pole, which means without sense or discernment, and hiding
the emptiness of his mind under the jargon of good society. After the
age of thirty-six he was forced to be as absolutely indifferent to
the fair sex as his master Charles X., punished, like that master, for
having pleased it too well. For eighteen years the idol of the faubourg
Saint-Germain, he had, like other heirs of great families led a
dissipated life, spent solely on pleasure. His father, ruined by the
revolution, had somewhat recovered his position on the return of the
Bourbons, as governor of a royal domain, with salary and perquisites;
but this uncertain fortune the old prince spent, as it came, in keeping
up the traditions of a great seigneur before the revolution; so that
when the law of indemnity was passed, the sums he received were all
swallowed up in the luxury he displayed in his vast hotel.

The old prince died some little time before the revolution of July aged
eighty-seven. He had ruined his wife, and had long been on bad terms
with the Duc de Navarreins, who had married his daughter for a first
wife, and to whom he very reluctantly rendered his accounts. The Duc
de Maufrigneuse, early in life, had had relations with the Duchesse
d'Uxelles. About the year 1814, when Monsieur de Maufrigneuse was
forty-six years of age, the duchess, pitying his poverty, and seeing
that he stood very well at court, gave him her daughter Diane, then in
her seventeenth year, and possessing, in her own right, some fifty or
sixty thousand francs a year, not counting her future expectations.
Mademoiselle d'Uxelles thus became a duchess, and, as her mother very
well knew, she enjoyed the utmost liberty. The duke, after obtaining
the unexpected happiness of an heir, left his wife entirely to her
own devices, and went off to amuse himself in the various garrisons of
France, returning occasionally to Paris, where he made debts which his
father paid. He professed the most entire conjugal indulgence, always
giving the duchess a week's warning of his return; he was adored by
his regiment, beloved by the Dauphin, an adroit courtier, somewhat of
a gambler, and totally devoid of affectation. Having succeeded to his
father's office as governor of one of the royal domains, he managed to
please the two kings, Louis XVIII. and Charles X., which proves he made
the most of his nonentity; and even the liberals liked him; but his