w himself to be placed at the head of the obnoxious,
utterly-defeated Legitimist party, as regent during the minority of
the Duke of Bordeaux? It was scarcely possible that he could maintain
his position. Republicans, Orleanists, and Imperialists, all would
combine against him. The army could not be relied upon to sustain
him. Ruin seemed inevitable--not only the confiscation of his
property, but probably also the loss of his head.

Should he allow himself to be made king by the bankers in Paris? He
would be an usurper; false to his own principles of legitimacy, to
those principles which had brought him into sympathy with the allied
dynasties of Europe in those long and bloody wars by which they had
forced rejected legitimacy back upon France.

The little Duke of Bordeaux and his grandfather, Charles X., were his
near blood relatives. He had received from the royal family great
favors--the restoration of his vast domains. He would be morally
guilty of the greatest ingratitude in assuming the attitude of their
antagonist, interposing himself between the lawful heir and the
crown. Should he stand aloof from these agitations, and take no part
in the movement of affairs, then anarchy or a Republic seemed the
inevitable result. In either case, he, as a rich Bourbon, with an
amount of wealth which endangered the state, would be driven from
France and his property confiscated.

But affairs pressed. Scarcely a moment could be allowed for
deliberation. The crisis demanded prompt and decisive action. The
embarrassment of the duke is painfully conspicuous in the interviews
which ensued. Anxiously he paced the floor of his library at Neuilly,
bewildered and vacillating.

There was a rich banker at Paris by the name of Lafitte. He called a
meeting at his house, of Guizot, Thiers, and other leading
journalists. There they decided to unite upon the Duke of Orleans,
and to combine immediately, without a moment's delay, all possible
influences in Paris, to place the sceptre of power in his hands,
before the dreaded Republicans should have the opportunity to grasp
it. It was the 30th of July, the last of the three days' conflict.
The thunders of the battle had scarcely ceased to echo through the
streets of the metropolis.

Baron Glandeves, governor of the Tuileries, and of course a warm
partisan of Charles X., who had probably heard a rumor of this
meeting, called upon M. Lafitte, and the following conversation is
reported as havi