sent
them to her family at Naples, Vienna, Madrid, and her letters used
warmly to recommend in foreign cities whatever was useful or beautiful
in France. She was thus in every way the Providence of the arts, of
industry, and commerce."

To sum up, the household of the Duchess of Berry worked to perfection,
and Madame, always affable and good, inspired a profound devotion in
all about her.

XIII

THE PREPARATIONS FOR THE CORONATION

The coronation of Louis XVI. took place the 11th of June, 1775, and
since that time there had been none. For Louis XVII. there was none but
that of sorrow. Louis XVIII. had desired it eagerly, but he was not
sufficiently strong or alert to bear the fatigue of a ceremony so long
and complicated, and his infirmities would have been too evident
beneath the vault of the ancient Cathedral of Rheims. An interval of
fifty years--from 1775 to 1825--separated the coronation of Louis XVI.
from that of his brother Charles X. How many things had passed in that
half-century, one of the most fruitful in vicissitudes and
catastrophes, one of the strangest and most troubled of which history
has preserved the memory!

Chateaubriand, who, later, in his Memoires d'outretombe, so full of
sadness and bitterness, was to speak of the coronation in a tone of
scepticism verging on raillery, celebrated at the accession of Charles,
in almost epic language, the merits of this traditional solemnity
without which a "Very Christian King" was not yet completely King. In
his pamphlet, Le roi est mort! Vive le roi! he conjured the new monarch
to give to his crown this religious consecration. "Let us humbly
supplicate Charles X. to imitate his ancestors," said the author of the
Genie du Christianisme. "Thirty-two sovereigns of the third race have
received the royal unction, that is to say, all the sovereigns of that
race except Jean 1er, who died four days after his birth, Louis XVII.,
and Louis XVIII., on whom royalty fell, on one in the Tower of the
Temple, on the other in a foreign land. The words of Adalberon,
Archbishop of Rheims, on the subject of the coronation of Hugh Capet,
are still true to-day. 'The coronation of the King of the French,' he
says, 'is a public interest and not a private affair, Publica, sunt
haec negotia, non privata.' May Charles X. deign to weigh these words,
applied to the author of his race; in weeping for a brother, may he
remember that he is King! The Chambers or the Deputies of