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the scandal of which reached even the throne, a decisive and honourable means was in the power of the king. To repudiate a succession so clouded with mystery would have silenced his enemies and done honour to himself. But the head of the Orleans family had early shown that indifference to money was not the virtue he aspired to. On the eve of passing to a throne he hastily consigned his personal property to his children, in order that he might not unite it with the state property, after the antique law of monarchy. Instead therefore of relinquishing his son's claim to the heritage of the Prince de Condé, he invited Madame de Feuchères to court, where she was gallantly received. Paris was in a stupor. The violence of public opinion rendered an inquiry inevitable; but no stone was left unturned to stifle the affair. The conseilleur-rapporteur, M. de la Huproie, showing himself resolved to get at the truth, was suddenly shifted elsewhere, and the place of judge which he had long desired for his son-in-law was at once accorded him.

At length, however, the action brought by the family of the Rohans, to invalidate the testament of the Duc de Bourbon in favour of the Duc d'Aumale, was tried. Few trials excited more interest. The veil which covered the details of the event was half drawn aside. M. Hennequin, in a speech full of striking facts and inferences, presented a picture of the violences and artifices by which the old Duc de Bourbon was hurried into consent to the will. In the well known sentiments of the prince, M. Hennequin saw the proof that the testament was not his real wish, but had been forced from him; and in the impossibility of suicide, he saw the proof of assassination. The younger M. Dupin replied with great dexterity. But it was remarked and commented on at the time, that he replied to precise facts and formal accusations with vague recriminations and tortuous explanations. He pretended that this action was nothing but a plot laid by the legitimistes; an attempt at vengeance; which he called upon all friends of the revolution of 1830 to resent. The interest of the legiti mistes in the affair was evident; but to combat an imposing mass of testimony something more than a vehement appeal to the recollections of July was necessary. The Rohans lost their cause before the jury: but, right or wrong, do not seem altogether to have lost it before the tribunal of public opinion.

The court soon ceased to feel any uneasiness respecting the noise which the affair still kept up. Nevertheless one thing was extremely tormenting in it. There was, and had been for some time in the house of Condé, a secret of which two persons were always the depositaries. This secret had been confided by the Duc de Bourbon, at the time of his stay in London, to Sir Wil

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liam Gordon, equerry to the Prince Regent, and to the Duc de Châtre. After their deaths M. de Chourlot received the confidence of the prince, and having been thrown from his horse and being considered in danger, admitted Manoury also into his confidence. No one ever knew what this secret was, except that it was most important and most redoubtable.

Whatever may be the conclusion arrived at by the reader respecting this mysterious affair, there can be but one sentiment respecting part of the conduct of Louis Philippe. Decency would have suggested that such a woman as the Baronne de Feuchères should not be welcomed at court, especially when such terrible suspicions were hanging over her. Decency would have suggested that the public should have full and ample conviction of the sincerity with which the causes of the prince's death where investigated. It does not seem to us that Louis Philippe acted with his usual tact in this case. For tact he has, and wonderful ability, in spite of the sneers of M. Louis Blanc. A man cannot rule France without courage, cleverness, and tact. Louis Philippe has abundantly shown to what a great extent he possesses all three. He uses his ministers and friends as tools, it is true; but it is no ordinary task to use such men as instruments for your own ends.

M. Louis Blanc, in common with most Frenchmen, is very bitter against the king; and the episode we have selected from his work must be read cum grano, as it is obviously dwelt upon for the purpose of inspiring his readers with his own animosity. True, the spirit of the whole work is biographical, anecdotical, personal; nevertheless we remark that M. Blanc selects with pleasure all the facts or anecdotes which tell against the king. He dwells with evident satisfaction on the vivid picture which he draws of the irresolution, the want of audacity, which Louis Philippe displayed when the throne was first offered to him; and very strongly depicts the utter want of participation which the Duc d'Orleans had in the Revolution. He neither conspired nor combated. His name was never mentioned, his person never thought of, till the Revolution was finished: and then, wanting a ruler, they elected him. with quiet sarcasm that M. Blanc points to the fact of Louis Philippe, the day after every émeute, always appearing in public with his family, especially on the theatre of the transaction, as if to associate in the people's minds the ideas of order and peace with the Orleans family.

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But we must here quit for the present the work of M. Louis Blanc: anxiously awaiting the appearance of the concluding volumes, and conscientiously recommending it to our readers as one of the most vivid, interesting, and important works that have recently issued from the French press.

ART. IV. De l'Agonie et de la Mort dans toutes les Classes de la Société, sous le Rapport Humanitaire, Physiologique, et Religieux. (Agony and Death in all Classes of Society: humanitarily, physiologically, and religiously considered.) Par H. LAUVERGNE. Paris. 1842.

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IN reading this book one is reminded of the practice of the French law-courts, where a good case is often disfigured by the advocate's oratorical redundancy and looseness of assertion. M. Lauvergne's Treatise on Death and Dying' contains a great deal of exceedingly curious and interesting matter; but his philosophic remarks are weakened by the looseness of his style; his narratives have a theatrical manner, which makes the reader sceptical in spite of himself; nor is our belief in his statements or his sense strengthened much, by proofs continually exhibited in his work of a credulity rather extraordinary in one of his nation and profession. A devout Roman Catholic, he has numberless little miracles to relate, and deals in stories of spiritual gifts and visions vouchsafed to the faithful. Such naïve confessions of faith would bring a sneer to the lips of Bichat or Broussais. We confess, for our parts, a great incredulity as to our author's supernatural flights; and in acknowledging, doubtless, the honesty, must frequently question the reasonableness, of his piety.

His religion, too, is a strange jumble of divinity and physic: he attempts to account for the mysteries of the one, by discoveries in the other; he speaks ominously on the sexes of souls; he says that the sublimest aspiration of the mind is its aspiration towards a feminine being,' and that all religions which endure, cannot arrive at the supreme and incomprehensible ideal, but by the intermediary of this feminine being, whom they have personified in the symbol of a virgin pure and immaculate.' As for the Protestant religion, it, says M. Lauvergne, admits the doctrines of Christianity with some variations, and there is nothing active in it, but good works, &c. Hence, from the absence of the aspiration after the feminine being, the Protestant adept is incapable of the higher delights of religion.' It is evident that our author has not studied much the Protestant's creed, and that he would be astonished to find it word for word in his own prayerbook.

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With regard to dying proper, and the physiological portion of his subject, M. Lauvergne carries his reader no farther than Bichat did forty years ago: except perhaps that he lays some considerable stress upon phrenology, which was not recognised until lately as a part of physiological science. But though it is

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now pretty well proved that certain conformations of the brain will determine certain qualities' of the subject, we are in truth no nearer the first principles than before; we are but in possession of one little link in the chain of effects, the cause of which lies hidden in eternity; and we come to no more than this, that a man with this or that conformation of brain will die probably in this or that manner. And no wonder: for conscious death is only the last act of living, in which, as in any other, the individual will act according to his nature.

To recur to the religious point of view, our author seems disposed to hint that to certain souls, more or less favourably disposed, and immediately before dissolution, a prescience is given of their condition in a future state, a celestial revelation, and a power of prophecy: all of which he exemplifies by various tales in support of his theory, and in all of which tales we confess to believe as little as possible. Because an hysterical nun on her deathbed sees her heavenly bridegroom descending to her; because an agonized sinner, in a delirious fever of remorse and cowardice, beholds a devil at his pillow who is about to drag him from it into the fiery pit; we are not called upon to respect their hallucinations at their last moments more than at any other time. We should otherwise be prepared to receive equally the revelations of persons, who have so-called spiritual gifts, and yet do not die: of Lord Shrewsbury's ecstatic virgin; of Kerner's saint and heavenseer of Prevorst; of the howlers of the unknown tongue in Newman-street; of the heroines of American revivals, foaming at the mouth, and shouting "Glory, glory;" of Corybantes, and Mænads, and Pythonesses; of all sects of illuminati in all countries. The Obi-woman works herself into a fit of real excitement, as she makes her fetish ready; the howling dervish is doubtless not an impostor; any man who has seen the Egyptian magicians knows that they are perfectly in earnest; and the preternatural visions of every one of these are quite as worthy of credit as are the gifts of M. Lauvergne's saints of the Roman Catholic community. The Virgin Mary will not appear to a Protestant pietist, any more than Bacchus will to a French or Spanish nun, who never heard of him. The latter lives surrounded perpetually by images of martyrs and saints. She kneels in chapel, her patroness is before her with a gilded glory round her head, with flowers at her altar, from which she looks down smiling friendly; the nun wakes at night, there is the picture of the Virgin above her lamp, the gilt glory round her head still, the dagger displayed in the mystic heart. What wonder that a woman so bred should see in the confusion or exaltation of death the figures on which her mind has dwelt a whole life through? Such apparitions are not new

images presented to the brain, but a repetition or combination of old ideas formed there. One does not invent, one only repeats in dreams; (the story in Mr. Dickens's America of the deaf, dumb, and blind girl, who spoke with her fingers, as the phrase is, in her sleep, is a very curious verification of this); and every case of vision that we have read has a similar earthy, nay individual origin. Saint Barbara or Saint Scolastica will never appear to a Bramin woman, we may depend on it; any more than Vishnu will manifest himself in a dream to a nun.

But there is little need to enter into these disquisitions in our Protesting country. The Seherin of Prevorst may have made her converts in Germany, but Lord Shrewsbury has not obtained for his Virgin many disciples here: and if we might be permitted to judge, Dr. Lauvergne has perhaps produced his marvellous stories not with a very profound credence to them himself, but from the desire that his book should have as mysterious an air as possible, and contain discoveries of some sort.

As this occasional supernatural illumination of the mind at the period of dissolution, is almost the only new point, with regard to the phenomenon of death, on which our author appears to insist, we may say that with respect to death in France or elsewhere, physiologically, humanitarily, or religiously, he has given us very little satisfactory information. But about dying, in other words living in France, his book is very curious and instructive, and must interest every person who approaches it. We get here a good moral picture of individuals of numerous classes in the neighbouring country. We have priests and nuns, soldiers and husbandmen, gentle and simple; and the Englishman will note many curious differences between their manner of being and his own. A late ingenious traveller in Ireland, Mr. Thackeray (whose pleasant Sketch-Book we recommend to all who would know Ireland well and judge her kindly), notes a French grave in the cemetery at Cork, with its ornaments and carvings and artificial flowers-" a wig," says he, "and a pot of rouge for the French soul to appear in at her last rising." The illustration is not a just one. artificial flowers do not signify a wig and pot of rouge-a mere love, that is, of the false and artificial pursued even into religion: these ornaments argue rather a love of what is real than of what is artificial. The custom of the Frenchman's religion unites this world with the next by means not merely of the soul, but of the body too. A human creature passes from earth to heaven or to purgatory almost as he does from London to Calais, carrying his individuality as completely with him in the one journey as in the other. Money is paid here towards

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