She Stands Accused

Excerpt: ...his roof and he sent her away-but only for a few days. Sophie soon was back again in Chantilly. The Prince made some attempt to get de Feucheres to return, but without success. De Feucheres applied for a post in the Army of Spain, an application which was granted at once. It took the poor man seven years to secure a judicial separation from his wife. The scandal of this change in the menage of Chantilly -it happened in 1822-reached the ears of the King, and the Baronne de Feucheres was forbidden to appear at Court. All Sophie's energies from then on were concentrated on getting the ban removed. She explored all possible avenues of influence to this end, and, incidentally drove her old lover nearly frantic with her complaints giving him no peace. Even a rebuff from the Duchesse de Berry, widow of the son of that prince who was afterwards Charles X, did not put her off. She turned up one day at the Tuileries, to be informed by an usher that she could not be admitted. This desire to be reinstated in royal favour is at the back of all Sophie's subsequent actions-this and her intention of feathering her own nest out of the estate of her protector. It explains why she worked so hard to have the Prince de Conde assume friendly relations with a family whose very name he hated: that of the Duc d'Orleans. It is a clue to the mysterious death, eight years later, of the Prince de Conde, last of the Condes, in circumstances which were made to pass as suicide, but which in unhampered inquiry would almost certainly have been found to indicate murder. % III Louis-Henri-Joseph, Duc de Bourbon and Prince de Conde, seems to have been rather a simple old man: a useless old sinner, true enough, but relatively harmless in his sinning, relatively venial in his uselessness. It were futile to seek for the morality of a later age in a man of his day and rank and country, just as it were obtuse to look for greatness in one so much at the mercy of circumstance. As far...