, no! Lawful, yes[63]!"

[Footnote 63: La Reine Hortense: Voyage en Italie, etc., p. 110.]

CHAPTER VIII.

LOUIS PHILIIPE AND THE DUCHESS OF ST. LEU.

The visit which Casimir Perrier had paid the duchess seemed to have
convinced him that the fears which the king and his ministry had
entertained had really been groundless, that the step-daughter of
Napoleon had not come to Paris to conspire and to claim the still
somewhat unstable throne of France for the Duke de Reichstadt or for
Louis Napoleon, but that she had only chosen the way through France, in
the anxiety of maternal love in order to rescue her son.

In accordance with this conviction, Louis Philippe no longer considered
it impossible to see the Duchess of St. Leu, but now requested her to
call. Perhaps the king, who had so fine a memory for figures and
money-matters, remembered that it had been Hortense (then still Queen of
Holland) who, during the hundred days of the empire in 1815, had
procured for the Duchess Orleans-Penthievre, from the emperor,
permission to remain in Paris and a pension of two hundred thousand
francs per annum; that it had been Hortense who had done the same for
the aunt of the present king, the Duchess of Orleans-Bourbon. Then, in
their joy over an assured and brilliant future, these ladies had written
the duchess the most affectionate and devoted letters; then they had
assured Hortense of their eternal and imperishable gratitude[64].
Perhaps Louis Philippe remembered this, and was desirous of rewarding
Hortense for her services to his mother and his aunt.

[Footnote 64: La Reine Hortense: Voyage en Italie, etc., p. 185.]

He solicited a visit from Hortense, and, on the second day of her
sojourn in Paris, M. de Houdetot conducted the Duchess of St. Leu to the
Tuileries, in which she had once lived as a young girl, as the
step-daughter of the emperor; then as Queen of Holland, as the wife of
the emperor's brother; and which she now beheld once more, a poor,
nameless pilgrim, a fugitive with shrouded countenance, imploring a
little toleration and protection of those to whom she had once accorded
toleration and protection.

Louis Philippe received the Duchess of St. Leu with all the elegance and
graciousness which the "Citizen King" so well knew how to assume, and
that had always been an inheritance of his house, with all the
amiability and apparent open-heartedness beneath which he so well knew
how to conceal his real dispositi