Page:Life of Louis Philippe, late king of the French.pdf/18

18 he had the pleasure of learning that the Duchess of Orleans had given birth to a son.

We have, in the foregoing pages, traced our hero from childhood to youth, and from youth to manhood; and we have seen him in poverty, with scarcely bread to eat, or a house wherein to lay his head. We have now the more pleasing duty of following him from comparative obscurity in a foreign land, to the home of his fathers, and of secing him, by the force of circumstances, reach the highest station which any earthly power can confer.

The domestic happiness the Duke of Orleans was enjoying in Palermo, was in 1814 unexpectedly interrupted by the intelligence that Napoleon had abdicated the throne, and that the Bourbons were to be restored to France. Being now enabled to return to his own country, and the inheritance of which he had been deprived, the Duke sailed from Sicily in a vessel which Lord William Bentinck placed at his disposal. On the 18th of May he arrived at Paris, where he was soon in the enjoyment of the honours due to his rank.

The return of Napoleon, in 1815, having broken up his arrangements for settling in his newly-recovered home, he sent his family to England, and was ordered by the king, Louis XVIII., to take command of the army of the north. In this situation he remained until 24th March, 1815, when, having given up the command to the Duke of Treviso, he joined his family in England, and again fixed his residence at Twickenham. In obedience to an ordinance issued after the Hundred Days, authorising all the princes of the blood to take their seats in the Chamber of Peers, the Duke went to France in September, 1815, for the purpose of being present; but the liberal sentiments he displayed were not agreeable to the administration, and he returned to England, where he remained till 1817. He now