ART. II.-Les Derniers Stuarts à Saint-Germain-en-Laye. Documents inédits et authentiques puisés aux archives publiques et privées par la Marquise CAMPANA DE Cavelli. Paris, London, and Edinburgh: 1871. 2 vols. 4to.

IT is long since the Stuarts have found as industrious and disinterested a devotee as the Marchesa Campana de Cavelli-an English lady, as we gather from the introduction to these volumes, by birth, though Italy is the country of her adoption, and French appears to be the language of her choice. The amount of pains and research which she has bestowed on this collection of documents, the first instalment we find of what will eventually form a very considerable addition to the mass of Stuart records, must have been immense, and we doubt if anyone before has ever been so prodigal of time and expense in the collection of historic papers.

In July 1864, the Marchesa tells us, she arrived at SaintGermain-en-Laye, and stood in front of the old château. Accustomed as she had been to meditate upon the ruins of Rome, and to live in imagination with the people of the past, she could not fail to call to mind the strange connexion of the gloomy and massive old edifice with the race of Stuart. Here had Mary Queen of Scots shone in all the brilliancy of her unhappy beauty, and received the homage of the court of the Valois as the bride of the Dauphin, and from this place she bade farewell for ever to the gay chivalry of France, with a sadness which seemed a presentiment of her tragic destiny. Here did Henrietta Maria, the queen of Charles I., seek a refuge from the troubles of the Fronde, when the axe sent her forth from the kingdom in which she had shared a throne to finish her days as a widow and in want in the country of her birth. Here, too, did another queen of England make her entry in tears as an exile, accompanied by her infant son, and led by the hand by the great monarch, who, with unrivalled generosity, had done all that delicacy could suggest and munificence could supply to make the fugitive forget the state of Whitehall and Saint James'. The magnificent toilet chamber of the queen, the caskets of silver and gold, the jewels which lay waiting for her, together with the sum of 6,000 livres d'or, in a splendid casket, of which the key was presented to her, were long the subject of talk of all the courts of Europe; nor were the apartments of the Prince of Wales, into which the French King himself conducted his little guest, fitted up with less care.

On the next day arrived the dethroned king. The staircase is yet pointed out, to the bottom of which the dauphin descended by order of Louis to receive the royal guest, while the king himself awaited the unhappy monarch in the Salle des gardes. When James arrived, Louis took him in his arms, as the former bowed low before him, and embraced him again and again, after which he led him to the queen and presented him, saying, Madame, I bring you a gentleman of your acquaintance whom you will be glad to see.' And then, to the surprise of the French courtiers, the King and Queen of England, in the joy of meeting, closely embraced in the presence of all the world.' Nor did the French monarch omit to give himself the pleasure of conducting his royal guest to the apartment of the infant Prince of Wales, and of showing the child to his father, saying, 'J'en ai eu grand soin; vous le trouverez en bonne santé.'

Here, too, within these walls was born the last princess of the House of Stuart, the graceful and charming Louisa Maria -the child of exile-whose sweet attractiveness is portrayed in the pages of Hamilton, and whose premature death added a new bitterness to the cup of affliction of her widowed mother. Here, too, did Louis XIV. say farewell and God speed to his royal cousin, after having furnished him with ships, and men, and arms, and millions, when the English king was about to depart on his luckless expedition to Ireland for the recovery of his throne. Monsieur,' the French king said, 'je vous vois 'partir avec douleur, cependant j'espère de ne vous revoir 'jamais; mais si par malheur vous revenez, soyez persuadé que vous me trouverez tel que vous me laissez.'

Here, too, thirteen years after the date of his flight from England, the dethroned Stuart monarch breathed his last, after that eventful interview in which Louis XIV. promised to recognise his son as king of England and to protect his interest. From hence, too, on the morrow, Mary Beatrice went to bury her widowed desolation in the convent of Chaillot, after having recognised her son as her king.

Miss Strickland relates her arrival as follows:

Mary Beatrice left St. Germains about an hour after her husband's death, attended by four ladies only, and arrived at Chaillot a quarter before six. The conventual church of Chaillot was hung with black. As soon as her approach was announced the bells tolled, and the abbess and all the community went in procession to receive her at the ancient gate. The widowed queen descended from her coach in silence with her hood drawn over her face, followed by four noble attendants, and apparently overwhelmed with the violence of her grief. The nuns gathered round her in silence; no one offered to speak comfort to her, well knowing how tender had been the union that had subsisted

between her and her deceased lord. The abbess kissed the hem of her robe, some of the sisters knelt and embraced her knees and others kissed her hand; but no one uttered a single word, leaving their tears to express how much they felt for her affliction. The tragedy of real life, unlike that of the stage, is usually a veiled feeling. "The Queen (one of the nuns of Chaillot has written in her account of the event) "walked directly into the choir without a sigh, a cry, or a word, like "one who has lost every faculty but the power of motion. She re"mained in this mournful silence, this stupefaction of grief, till one of "our sisters (it was the beloved Françoise Angélique Priolo) approached, "and, kissing her hand, said to her in a tone of tender admonition, in "the words of the royal Psalmist, My soul, will you not be subject unto God?' 'Fiat voluntas tua,' replied Mary Beatrice in a voice "stifled with sighs; then advancing towards the choir, she said in a "firmer tone: Help me, my sisters, to thank my God for his mercies "to that blessed spirit who is, I believe, rejoicing in his beatitude. Yes, "I feel certain of it in the depth of my grief.' The abbess told her she "was happy in having been the wife of such a holy prince. Yes,' "answered the queen, we have now a great saint in heaven.'"' Indeed, James died, as he had lived in his later years, in the most fervent spirit of piety, with forgiveness on his lips towards all whom he considered his enemies, and with messages of love for his daughters, whom he might be excused for regarding as unnatural children. There is no reason to doubt that his Catholicism was sincere, since he sacrificed everything on its behalf, and that his profession of religious toleration, although he endeavoured to carry it into practice by unconstitutional means, was sincere also; but it was the toleration of an outlawed, not a dominant Church. So great was the impression which the piety of his latter days made upon the ecclesiastics around him, and so strong was the conviction at Rome that he had lost his crown from his attachment to Catholicism, that there was some thought at one time of his being made a saint in the calendar.

After the death of her husband, Mary Beatrice resolved to wear mourning for the rest of her life, and ever after she appeared in black. As the grief of his attached wife subsided into something like calm regret, the life of the dark old château assumed the gayest aspect which it knew during the time of its Stuart occupation. Mary Beatrice, as regent and the mother of her son, shook off her natural aversion to politics, and carried on the negotiations with the Jacobite party; and as her son was as yet too young to be engaged in perilous expeditions, the heart of the mother was at peace for a while. The young prince and princess, both attractive in form and face, engaging in manners, and gay and sportive in tastes, filled the gloomy château with the light of

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their joyous and advancing youth, and the glades of the forest rang often with their laughter and were witnesses of their sports. The happy children forgat their exiled lot, and made a little Arcadia around them. From the pages of the inimitable and gay Hamilton we learn that in spring and summer the young prince and his sister exercised their fancies incessantly in the invention of some new sylvan pastime. Now they led their little court into the depths of the forest in search of wild flowers and strawberries; now they designed little pilgrimages on foot to some shrine or chapel within walk of the palace, carrying with them some light refreshment on which they could picnic in the forest on their return; now they floated along a joyous party on the bosom of the Seine, and they never forgot in the month of June to make a party among the haymakers, when the princess and her governess, Lady Middleton, made rival haycocks against the Duchess of Berwick and her friends. Once we read of both prince and princess dancing among the masqueraders admitted to the terrace on Shrove Tuesday; and in winter the courts of St. Germains and Versailles exchanged balls and receptions.

Often must the prince, in his after life of disappointed hopes, when he was an exile even from St. Germains, have looked back to this merry time, when even the widowed queen forgot her grief for a while in smiles, at the gay fancies of her son and the charming daughter who passed away in the springtime of life. But this happy period was of short duration. The prince was barely twenty when he was called to place himself at the head of his first Jacobite expedition to Scotland; and from that time the unhappy queen knew no more of the tranquil delights of maternity. Soon after the prince's return from this his first unfortunate essay to regain the throne of his ancestors, both he and his sister were taken ill with the smallpox; and the blithe-hearted and unfortunate young princess, the delight of her mother's heart, and the joy of the French as well as of the English inhabitants of St. Germains, was taken suddenly away. Then followed the Peace of Utrecht, by the conditions of which Louis was constrained to deny himself the privilege of any longer giving refuge to the prince, who now began to be called the Pretender; and from that time the unhappy queen remained virtually childless as well as a widow, and saw her beloved son but twice more in the course of her life.

She yearned now desperately to bury her sorrow entirely in the convent of Chaillot, where she spent regularly some months of every year, finding in her intimate communion with

the inmates of the house infinitely more pleasure than in the mock state of St. Germains; but she was instructed that the interests of her son forbade any such seclusion, and she remained at the dreary palace alone. The cares of her position were, however, immense. From the time of her arrival in France, her pension, to which she was entitled from England by her marriage-contract and in right of her dowry, was stopped, and the money retained by William of Orange, while she became a pensioner on the bounty of France; her pension, moreover, in the latter part of the reign of Louis was irregularly paid, and she was literally eaten up by the swarm of starving English Jacobites who had planted themselves to the number at first of twenty thousand on the bounty of the exiled monarch, and were for ever clamouring for relief at St. Germains. The distress of the queen became so severe that she sold all her jewels, with the exception of the ring with which she had been married and one other. While her compassion for the starving people around her was so great that she sometimes rated her lady of the household for giving her too expensive a diet for dinner. She used to stint herself in necessaries, look jealously to the wear of her shoes and gloves, and ran in debt to the nuns of Chaillot for the rent of her apartments, in a sum which it does not appear was ever paid. The death of her protector Louis XIV. added another shade of gloom to her desolate existence. She was, too, in her latter years much afflicted by recurring crises of a painful disease, that of cancer, to which she finally succumbed. It was, indeed, a release from a life of pain when she died on the 7th of May, 1718.

The mother of the Regent, well known for her caustic turn of speech, had nothing but good to say of Mary of Modena.

'I write to you with a troubled heart, and all yesterday I was weeping. Yesterday morning about seven o'clock the good, pious, and virtuous queen of England died at St. Germains. She must be in heaven. She left not a dollar for herself, but gave away all to the poor, maintaining many families. She never in her life did wrong to anyone. If you were about to tell a story of anybody, she would say, "If it be any ill, I beg you not to relate it to me. I do not like stories which attack the reputation.""

As for her manner it is sufficient to recall the expression of Louis to his Court as she was leaving Versailles on her first visit: See what a queen should be.' Her mien,' says SaintSimon, was the noblest, the most majestic, and imposing in the world, but it was also sweet and modest.'

Up to the date of the French Revolution, even when the last heirs of the House of Stuart were excluded from France