he time when the
Dauphiness entered France.

The old king, Louis the Fifteenth, had ruined his health, as well as
made himself detested, by his vices. At one time, when he was very ill,
Paris was crowded with hungry wretches who had come up from the country,
in hopes of finding a living in the capital. The police had orders to
clear the city, every now and then, of these beggars, and send them back
to their native places. On one occasion the police carried off some
children of respectable persons, in hopes of getting large sums of money
for ransom. The mothers of these children, seeking them in the streets
and squares, and weeping as they went, attracted crowds; and a report
was spread, and believed at once, that the physicians of the king had
ordered for his cure baths of children's blood! Those who believed this
nonsense rose in a riot, before it was found that the missing children
were alive and safe; and several of the poor misled rioters were hanged.

This story proves more than the ignorance of the suffering people. It
shows how the royal family and their attendants were regarded,--how
tyrannical and cruel, how selfish and how powerful, they were thought.
The royal family was from this time forward greatly wronged by the
people; but it was because the people had already been much more wronged
by the rich and powerful. They had been so ground down into poverty and
wretchedness, that they felt the fiercest envy, the most brutal rage,
towards all the wealthy and noble, believing them born to be unboundedly
happy, and to make everybody below them as miserable as they pleased.
Never, perhaps, were the absurd notions of the privileges of royalty
held in such exaggeration as by the common people of France at this
time; and never, perhaps, was a more intense hatred shown among men than
by those who abolished this royalty. The story of the young king Louis
the Seventeenth, which is now to be told, is a standing lesson to all
who may imagine that to be a prince is to be happier than other people.

VOLUME TWO, CHAPTER TWO.

ROYAL WAYS.

Louis the Seventeenth was born in 1785. He was the second son of the
princess who passed through Saint Menehould from Vienna, after her
marriage. From being Dauphiness she had since become queen, and her
eldest boy was now the Dauphin. This second son, whose history we are
to follow, was called the Duke of Normandy; and as he was never likely
to be anything more, there was