"It would be vain to try to paint the transports which these words excited in the whole family. The soldier leaped upon the neck of the general to embrace him; the father, the mother, the youngest of the children, clung around him to kiss his hands and his clothes. It is needless to add, they vowed to him that he might stay with them securely, and that they would all of them suffer death rather than reveal the secret.

"The general remained for some time after with these brave people. And what should be further noted to their praise, he found it quite impossible on leaving them to get them to accept the least indemnity for either the trouble or the expense which he had cost them. It was only a long time after that he succeeded in persuading them to profit, in another form, by his influence."

The Memoirs record a number of other clients no less conspicuous-ex-ministers such as Carnot; dukes as those of Rovigo, of Vincennes; poets like Beranger; priests like the Abbé de Pradt; professors, journalists, princes, and in fine, kings.

Among the priests we may note, as an example of the times, the affair of one Rebecqui, who, to legitimate his offspring begotten in defiance of his priestly vows before the Revolution, availed himself of the permission allowed the clergy by this new era, to enter into the state of matrimony, deemed unholy in the priests alone. The objection to the validity of this retroactive legitimation was the old rule that it could apply only to parties free from other obligations at the time of the conception, or ex soluto et soluta. M. Dupin attacked not only the objection but the axiom. He argued that in the case on which it principally rests, that of offspring begotten in adultery, the legitimation is debarred, not by the fact of the existence of a repugnant obligation in one of the parents at the time, but by an act of legislation that forbids perpetually the marriage, and thus precludes the normal means of the legitimation. Even in the case of incestuous children, the obstruction is the same; they cannot be legitimated; not because the parents are too near of kin, but because the law, for prudent reasons, forbids the necessary meansa marriage. But the law has equally the power, continued M. Dupin, to remove this prohibition of its own making, and much more clearly than individuals, such as the popes, who have often exercised it, in the shape of dispensations even to priests. Now a legal and universal dispensation of the clergy had been promulgated by the legislative body of the Revolution. The subsequent marriage of the priest Rebecqui had been consequently authorized. It therefore purged the stain of bastardy from the children.

The distinction in the old law maxim is remarkably shrewd and sound, and the deduction from the legal premises is manifestly cogent. But the advocate, it seems to us, slid out of view the consideration that the obstruction which affected priests before the marriage-law, and even after, was of a nature rather religious than

legal, like those compared with it, and had accordingly its origin in the Canon law, or in mere Church discipline. M. Dupin, however, gained his cause, and this, he does not fail to tell us, (of course from candid admiration, not a calculation of vain-glory,) notwithstanding that his opponent was the "most finished dialectician that he ever since encountered" in his long practice. But the tribunal was of the imperial date of 1809; had it been a few years later, no doubt the issue would have been different. In fact, another case of the same nature, (which follows next in the Memoirs,) save that the priest had here the children after marriage instead of before, was decided, in 1824, against the validity of the marriage; but this decision, through the irresistible intervention of M. Dupin, was overruled on the second trial by a higher court.

We pass over the other categories to reserve the remaining space for some curious incidents of the kingly clientship of Louis Philippe. We cannot, however, pass unnoticed a case more curious and romantic; the more especially as it serves as a fitting introduction to that royal personage.

The subject was the notorious intrigante, Maria Stella, alias Lady Newborough, alias Baroness de Sternberg, who amused the lovers of the marvellous and the scandalous in Europe from 1825 to 1830. This woman began life as a singer on the stage, whence she was taken into wedlock by Lord Newborough; for British noblemen had, until recently, like our American aristocracy, a strange alacrity to bite the hook of the battered votaries of Calliope. Maria Stella, in a second marriage, caught again a noble gudgeon, in the shape of the Baron de Sternberg, a Russian-a nation touching on the same predicament in point of cash and cultivation. Encouraged probably by these successes to aspire at least to French royalty, and having failed perhaps to catch a duke or even "count" of that less verdant race, she set to work according to a different and a more daring plan.

It was no less than to pretend that she was daughter of the Duchess of Chartres and of Philippe Egalité, Duke of Orleans; that on her birth, which took place in Tuscany, during a tour of her alleged parents under the names of the Count and Countess de Joinville, she had been exchanged by the prince her father, who had no sons and desired an heir, for the male infant of Lorenzo Chiappini, turnkey of the village prison, whose wife was delivered at the same time as the duchess; and that in fine the substitution had been made known to her by "revelations," as she was travelling with her second husband in Italy.

The direct result of the pretension was to proclaim that Louis

Philippe, then Duke of Orleans, was the low-born son of a concierge. The thing was countenanced, if not concocted, by the court party of the day, who were at daggers with the wily duke, then undermining his Bourbon cousins. It must be owned, too, there was something tending to encourage the imposture in both the character and the exterior of the subsequently citizen-king. The gait and countenance of Louis Philippe were as far as possible from royalty, and the craftiness of his government and the cowardice of his fall were less in character with the descendant of a line of kings than of a concierge. On the other hand, the retired singer pretended to a striking likeness with the Count de Beaujolais and Madame Adelaide of Orleans. However, Maria Stella had to find for the law some surer evidence than either party predispositions or personal appearance.

She returned then to Italy, and laid her case, as above stated, before the ecclesiastical tribunal of an obscure town of the Papal state. Her claim, being legally unopposed, was recorded without difficulty, her certificate of birth and baptism were rectified as she demanded, and she herself was declared "daughter of the Count and Countess de Joinville, French." Here then was a documentary foundation for her pretension. She transmitted it forthwith to an accomplice of hers in Paris, who entitled himself the Chevalier Mortara, directing that it should be laid at the feet of His Majesty Louis XVIII., and praying his majesty that Maria Stella be declared a princess of the house of Orleans.

Some scruples, or rather fears, being however still named by the court party, the chevalier consulted a lawyer. The man of law told him that, assuming the certificate to have been genuine, it was all very well as far as it went. The Baroness de Sternberg was verily declared the daughter of a count and a countess de Joinville; but there was nothing to evince the identity of this Count de Joinville with Louis Philippe (Egalité) of Orleans.

In addition to this legal stumbling block, the Baroness de Sternberg was thwarted still more seriously at the same moment from another quarter. Her brother, Thomas Chiappini, appeared against her in the newspapers, provoked no doubt by instigation of, or expectation from, Louis Philippe. He ridiculed and refuted her aspirations to nobility, insisted that she was his sister, affirmed that she claimed as such a part in the succession of their common father, and this, too, after the time when she pretended to have got the letter that revealed to her the royalty of her birth; and finally, as to her likeness to the family of Orleans, he declared that of all the children of Chiappini, she most resembled the concierge.

To make sure, however, of his ground, the Duke of Orleans put the matter into the hands of M. Dupin, already a member of his council. The learned jurist made a refutatory report on the case, of the merits of which he gives us an exposé in the Memoirs; but in conclusion he advised his princely client to keep quiet until the Baroness de Sternberg should proceed further. As was the hope, no doubt, she did not proceed further for some five years. But at the beginning of 1830, Maria Stella reappeared in a volume bearing the following captivating title: "Maria Stella, or the Criminal Substitution of a Young Lady of the Highest Rank for a Boy of the most Abject Condition." The title-page announced besides: "Sold for the benefit of the poor in Paris and the Departments, at the principal booksellers." This was followed by a portrait, attempting a resemblance to the Princess Adelaide of Orleans; and underneath was read: “Maria Stella, Lady Newborough, Baroness Sternberg, née de Joinville."

The volume thus put forth in the most finished claptrap fashion, could not fail, even in France, to have a great succès de curiosité. But party interests moreover were concerned in the circulation. And the newspapers, the natural organs and habitual instruments of both those influences, gave it the éclât which they would deny, no doubt through ignorance, to books of merit. The public feelings thus excited, Maria Stella laid, in form, a requisition before the court of first resort of the Seine. The time was come, then, for the Duke of Orleans and his attorney to defend themselves.

Two courses of procedure were before them. The Duke of Orleans wished himself, or perhaps only feigned to wish, to address himself directly to the crown and the chamber of peers, for the political suppression of a case affecting the position and the honour of a peer of France, the first prince of the blood, and even an heir eventual to the throne; the other was the legal course of going before the civil tribunal. The latter was the one adopted, M. Dupin does not say why; but no doubt the reason was the known feelings of the Bourbons in the premises. The civil court, however, dismissed the case, though upon technical objections. And thus was terminated a proceeding, which, for boldness of conception and plausibility of prosecution, transcends the license of romance.

We can afford to add but little on the large portion of the Memoirs, which are devoted to the private business of Louis Philippe become king-affairs in which, in fact, Dupin has figured largely in every sense. The arithmetical recollections are the most exact and

least egotistical.

Americans have often heard of the immense wealth of Louis

Philippe, and that his father, Philippe Egalité, while the most sans-culotte of democrats, was yet the richest of the princes of Europe; but they do not understand, perhaps, the source of this wealth. Exceeding that of even the royal branch of the house of Bourbon, it could not reasonably be supposed to have been given by the crown. It proceeded in fact from a curious concentration of inheritances, which, together with the unexpected elevation to the throne, might have well persuaded the Orleans family of their being the special care of fortune. And yet the luck-like preparation was but to show them to be its sport!

The patrimonial property or appanage of the House of Orleans was augmented in the hands of the father of Louis Philippe by the estates: 1st, of the Duchess de Guise; 2d, of Mademoiselle de Guise; 3d, of Mademoiselle de Montpensier; 4th, of the Duchess de Bourbon-representing three of the most powerful families of the kingdom. On the other side, the wife of the same Philippe of Orleans was only daughter of the great Duke of Penthièvre, and was through him the heiress of the following inheritances: 1st, of the Duke and the Duchess of Maine; 2d, of the Count and the Countess of Toulouse; 3d, of the Prince de Dombes; 4th, of the Count d'Eu; 5th, of the Prince de Lamballe-all of these being princely branches of the royal family of France, and two or three of them even legitimated sons of Louis XIV. Such then were the separate portions of the parents of Louis Philippe, which devolved jointly to himself and to his sole sister. And as the sister never married, her part continued in the family stock; which stock was finally piled up by the possessions of the House of Condé, left to a son of Louis Philippe, the Duke d'Aumale! With this enormous accumulation of domains and principalities in the possession of a single family aspiring to the throne, where is the kingdom or the empire that could maintain its existence ?

It should be said, however, that this vast confluence of near a dozen princely fortunes, had suffered serious diminution before reaching the family of Louis Philippe. The Revolution swept it totally away for a time. At this epoch, the purchase value of the possessions of Philippe Egalité amounted to one hundred and twelve millions, and the annual income from feudal dues was no less than five to six millions. The latter item was abolished beyond recall. The territorial domains also had been confiscated at the time, and for the most part disposed of by the nation. But upon the Restoration in 1814, the unsold portion was returned to the heirs. The value of this residue was, M. Dupin says, less than twelve millions. Along with it was entailed also on Louis Philippe and his sister the