Meantime France was subsiding into quiet, with occasional slight
shocks of revolutionary earthquake, before returning to order and
peace. The king was _le bon bourgeois_. He had lived a great deal
in England and the United States, and spoke English well. He had
even said in his early youth that he was more of an Englishman
than a Frenchman. He was short and stout. His head was shaped like
a pear, and was surmounted by an elaborate brown wig; for in those
days people rarely wore their own gray hair.

He did not impress those who saw him as being in any way majestic;
indeed, he looked like what he was,--_le bon père de famille_.
As such he would have suited the people of England; but it was
_un vert galant_ like Henri IV., or royalty incarnate, like Louis
XIV., who would have fired the imagination of the French people.
As a good father of a family, Louis Philippe felt that his first
duty to his children was to secure them a good education, good
marriages, and sufficient wealth to make them important personages
in any sudden change of fortune.

At the time of his accession all his children were unmarried,--indeed,
only four of them were grown up. The sons all went to _collège_,--which
means in France what high-school does with us. Their mother's
dressing-room at Neuilly was hung round with the laurel-crowns,
dried and framed, which had been won by her dear school-boys.

The eldest son, Ferdinand, Duke of Orleans, was an extraordinarily
fine young man, far more a favorite with the French people than his
father. Had he not been killed in a carriage accident in 1842, he
might now, in his old age, have been seated on the French throne.