,
sought to reconcile himself with the king: this was Louis-Philippe
Joseph, Duc d'Orleans, first prince of the blood. I pause for this man,
before whom history has hitherto paused, without being able to discover
the real place which should be assigned to him amongst the passing
events. An enigma to himself, he remains an enigma for posterity. Was
the real solution of this enigma ambition or patriotism, weakness or
conspiracy? Let facts reply.

Public opinion has its prejudices. Struck by the immensity of the work
it accomplishes; giddy, as it were, by the rapidity of the movement
which urges things on, it cannot believe that a series of natural
causes, combined by Providence with the rise of certain ideas in the
human mind, and aided by the coincidence of the times, can of itself
produce such vast commotions. It seeks, then, the supernatural--the
wonderful--fatality. It takes pleasure in imagining latent causes acting
with mystery, and compelling with hidden hand men and events. It takes,
in a word, every revolution for a conspiracy; and if it meets at
starting, in the middle, or at the end of such crises some leading man,
to whose interest these events may tend, it supposes itself the author,
attributes to itself all the action of these revolutions, and all the
scope of idea that accomplishes them; and, fortunate or unfortunate,
innocent or guilty, claims for itself all the glory or demerit of the
result. It renders its name divine, or its memory accursed. Such, for
fifty years, was the destiny of the Duc d'Orleans.

IV.

It is a historic tradition amongst people from the highest antiquity,
that the throne wears out royal races, and that whilst the reigning
branches grow enervated by the possession of empire, younger branches
become stronger and greater, by nourishing the ambition of becoming more
powerful, and inspiring more closely to the people an air less corrupt
than that which pervades courts. Thus, whilst primogeniture gives power
to the elder, the people confer popularity on the juniors.

This singularity of a handsomer and more popular family than the
reigning family, increasing near the throne, and having a dangerous
rivalry with the throne in the mind of the nation, had always existed in
the house of Orleans, since the time of Louis XIV. If this equivocal
situation gave to the princes of this family some virtues, it gave them
also corresponding vices. More intelligent and more ambitious than the
king