taining an audience of
her, and used the familiar form of address, she smiled faintly, and bade
him beware. "Call me Madame de Bretagne, or de Bourgogne, or de
Lorraine," she said, "for here I am so identified with these
provinces--[which the Emperor wished her to claim from her uncle Louis
XVIII.]--that I shall end in believing in my own transformation." After
these discussions she was so closely watched, and so many restraints were
imposed upon her, that she was scarcely less a prisoner than in the old
days of the Temple, though her cage was this time gilded. Rescue,
however, was at hand.

In 1798 Louis XVIII. accepted a refuge offered to him at Mittau by the
Czar Paul, who had promised that he would grant his guest's first request,
whatever it might be. Louis begged the Czar to use his influence with the
Court of Vienna to allow his niece to join him. "Monsieur, my brother,"
was Paul's answer, "Madame Royale shall be restored to you, or I shall
cease to be Paul I." Next morning the Czar despatched a courier to Vienna
with a demand for the Princess, so energetically worded that refusal must
have been followed by war. Accordingly, in May, 1799, Madame Royale was
allowed to leave the capital which she had found so uncongenial an asylum.

In the old ducal castle of Mittau, the capital of Courland, Louis XVIII.
and his wife, with their nephews, the Ducs d'Angouleme and de Berri,
were awaiting her, attended by the Abbe Edgeworth, as chief
ecclesiastic, and a little Court of refugee nobles and officers.

[The Duc d'Angonleme was quiet and reserved. He loved hunting as means of
killing time; was given to early hours and innocent pleasures. He was a
gentleman, and brave as became one. He had not the "gentlemanly vices" of
his brother, and was all the better for it. He was ill educated, but had
natural good sense, and would have passed for having more than that had he
cared to put forth pretensions. Of all his family he was the one most ill
spoken of, and least deserving of it.--DOCTOR DORAN.]

With them were two men of humbler position, who must have been even more
welcome to Madame Royale,--De Malden, who had acted as courier to Louis
XVI. during the flight to Varennes, and Turgi, who had waited on the
Princesses in the Temple. It was a sad meeting, though so long anxiously
desired, and it was followed on 10th June, 1799, by an equally sad
wedding,--exiles, pensioners on the bounty of the Russian monarch,
fulfi