the matter. Then I offered to do it without his help. Said I: 'On
the first interview that you and I have without witnesses, put
a million of francs, in bank-notes, on the mantelpiece, which I
will pocket unseen by you. Then leave the rest to me.' Laffitte
still fought shy of it, hesitated, deliberated, and at last decided
that he would have nothing at all to do with it."

[Footnote 1: Vincent Nolte, Fifty Years in Two Hemispheres.]

Here the gentleman to whom Lafayette was speaking exclaimed, "If
any one had told me this but yourself, General, I would not have
believed it."

Lafayette merely answered, "It was really so,"--a proof, thinks
the narrator, how fiercely the fire of revolution still burned
in the old man's soul.

The last months of Louis XVIII.'s life were embittered by changes
of ministry from semi-liberal to ultra-royalist, and by attempts
of the officers of the Crown to prosecute the newspapers for
free-speaking. He died, after a few days of illness and extreme
suffering, Sept. 15, 1824, and was succeeded by the Comte d'Artois,
his brother, as Charles X. This was the third time three brothers
had succeeded each other on the French throne.

Charles X. was another James II., with cold, harsh, narrow ideas
of religion, though religion had not influenced his early life
in matters of morality. He was, as I have said, a widower, with
one remaining son, the Duc d'Angoulême, and a little grandson, the
son of the Duc de Berri. His two daughters-in-law, the Duchesse