leave to his majesty's parental care the charge of maintaining
public order. Let us not urge a revengeful spirit which malevolence
may convert into a weapon for disturbing the peace of the nation. Our
position as judges of appeal over those very individuals to whom you
recommend the exercise of severity, rather than of mercy, should
impose absolute silence upon us in respect to them."

These just and noble sentiments the majority applauded, and the vote
was carried in behalf of humanity. But the king and his coterie were
very angry, and assailed the duke in the most violent terms of
condemnation. The king, in a petty spirit of revenge, issued a
decree, recalling the ordinance that all the princes of the blood
royal were to sit in the Chamber of Peers, and declaring that none in
future were to appear there but by special authority of the king,
delivered at each particular sitting.

This was intended as a deliberate insult to the Duke of Orleans, to
exclude him from the Chamber of Peers, and to degrade him in the eyes
of the partisans of the king. This pitiful spirit of persecution
greatly increased the general popularity of the duke, which led to a
redoubled clamor of calumny on the part of his opponents. He was
accused of seeking to rally around him the malcontents, of courting
the favor of the populace, and of trying to organize an _Orleans
faction_ in his interests.

[Illustration: MARSHAL NEY.]

The clamor was so loud and so annoying, and the duke found himself so
entirely excluded from the sympathies of the court and of the
dominant nobles, that, to escape from the storm, he imposed upon
himself voluntary exile, and again, forsaking France, sought refuge
with his family in his English retreat at Twickenham.

The annoying report was circulated, that the duke was banished by an
indignant decree of the king, which, out of regard to the duke's
feelings, he had not made public. Louis Philippe was fully conscious
of the great unpopularity of the elder branch of the Bourbons, and of
the feeble tenure by which they held their power, sustained against
the popular will by the bayonets of the Allies.

The duke had hardly arrived at Twickenham ere he received an
affecting letter from the wife of Marshal Ney, entreating him to
intercede with the Prince Regent of England for the life of her noble
husband, then in prison awaiting the almost certain doom of death.
The duke did plead for him in the most earnest terms; but his