ember, 1703, shared his cell at different
periods with other prisoners, a police spy and a lackey, and was buried
without any attempt at mystery! The original register of his death,
reproduced before its destruction among other archives of the city of
Paris in 1871, gives his name as _Marchioly_, though it had been read
_Marchialy_ by all the commentators (the tail of the o being really a
trifle too high for an a), and it is now considered settled that this
signified Mattioli, in the uncertain orthography of the times, Count
Hercule-Antoine Mattioli, secretary of the Duke of Mantua, whom Louis
XIV had caused to be arrested on Italian soil, in defiance of
international law, for having betrayed the secrets of the negotiations
relative to the acquisition of Casal.

The sudden and tragic death of _Madame_, Henriette d'Angleterre, wife of
the king's brother, Monsieur, le Duc d'Orleans, made famous by Bossuet's
funeral oration, long ascribed to poison, has been elucidated by Littre
in what has been designated as the finest example known of "a
retrospective medical demonstration." She had just returned from
England, bearing with her the treaty of Dover, signed by her brother,
Charles II, in which that monarch agreed to abandon the alliance with
Holland, and died suddenly in great agony after taking her usual glass
of chicory-water in the evening. The autopsy, which was performed by the
most celebrated surgeons of France, aided by two or three English
physicians, revealed a small perforation in the walls of the stomach,
which the doctors, knowing no other way of accounting for, agreed must
have been made accidentally by the point of their scissors. Littre
demonstrates that this accident was very improbable, and that the
perforation was evidently caused by an ulcer of the stomach,--a disease
unknown to the medical science of the time.

[Illustration: END-OF-CENTURY TYPE.

By F. Fournery.]

Louis XIV was preceded to the tomb by his only son, the dauphin, in
April, 1711; by the Duc de Bourgogne, become dauphin in February, 1712,
his wife having died six days before; by the Duc de Bretagne, eldest of
the sons of the Duc de Bourgogne, three weeks after his parents; by the
Duc de Berry, grandson of the king, on the 4th of May, 1714. Such a
succession of calamities roused the gravest suspicions, and the Duc
d'Orleans, afterward regent, openly accused of the use of poison,
seriously contemplated demanding permission of the king to