eeded friendship, and he gave himself
favourites; but he chose them rather for their elegance than their
merit, and saw men and things only through books and the hearts of
courtiers. Somewhat theatrical, he exhibited himself as a statue of
right and misfortune to all Europe; studied his attitudes; spoke
learnedly of his adversaries; and assumed the position of a victim and a
sage: he was, however, unpopular with the army.

XV.

The Comte d'Artois, his junior, spoiled by nature, by the court, and by
the fair sex, had taken on himself the _role_ of a hero. He represented
at Coblentz antique honour, chivalrous devotion, and the French
character; he was adored by the court, whose grace, elegance, and pride
were personified in him: his heart was good, his mind apt, but not well
informed, and of limited comprehension. A philosopher, through indolence
and carelessness before the Revolution, superstitious afterwards,
through weakness and _entrainment_, he threatened the Revolution with
his sword from a distance. He appeared more fitted to irritate than to
conquer, and at this early period he already manifested that unbridled
rashness and that useless spirit of provocation which was one day to
cost him a throne. But his personal beauty, his grace, and his
cordiality, covered all these defects, and he seemed destined never to
die. Old in years, he was fated to reign, and die, eternally young. He
was the prince of youth: at another epoch he would have been Francis I.,
in his own he was Charles X.

The Prince de Conde was a soldier by birth, inclination, and profession.
He despised these two courts, transposed to the banks of the Rhine, for
his court was his camp. His son, the Duc de Bourbon, served his first
campaign under his orders, and his grandson, the Duc d'Enghien, in his
seventeenth year, acted as his aide-de-camp. This young prince was the
representative of manly grace in the camp of the _emigres_; his bravery,
his enthusiasm, his generosity, all seemed to promise another hero to
the heroic race of Conde. He was worthy of conquering in a cause not
doomed, of dying sword in hand on the battle field, and not to fall,
some years later, in the fosse at Vincennes, by the "lantern dimly
burning," with no other friend than his dog, by the balls of a platoon
of soldiers, ordered out at dead of night, as if for an assassination.

XVI.

Louis XVI. trembled in his palace at the shock of this war which he
himself had proclaime