if I had thought I could be useful.”  And he added:  “It was thought that it would be a sinecure for me.  Far from that, I gave myself up wholly to my new employment, and I worked so hard at it, than in less than a year my eyes, previously excellent, were almost ruined.  I always occupied fifteen or twenty places, each more gratuitous than the others.  To make the religion that I practise beloved and to serve my neighbor, has always seemed to me the best way to serve God.  So I believe that I can say without fear of contradiction that I have never done any one harm, and that I have always tried to do all the good possible.”

In the month of August, 1824, the Duke of Doudeauville was named minister of the King’s household.  In this post he showed administrative qualities of a high order.  In April, 1827, not wishing to share in a measure that he regarded as both inappropriate and unpopular, the disbanding of the Parisian National Guard, he gave in his resignation.  “I did not wish,” he said, “to join the Opposition.  The popularity given me by my resignation would have assured me a prominent place, but this role agreed neither with my character nor with my antecedents.  I resolved on absolute silence and complete obscurity; I even avoided showing myself in Paris, where I knew that manifestations of satisfaction and gratitude would be given to me.”  King Louis Philippe said one day to Marshal Gerard:  “Had they listened to the Duke of Doudeauville, and not broken up the National Guard of Paris, the revolution would not have taken place.”

The great lord, good citizen, and good Christian, who, at periods most disturbed by changes of regime, had always been as firm in the application of his principles as he was moderate in his actions and gentle in his method, made himself as much respected under Louis Philippe as under the Restoration.  During the cholera, he set the example of absolute devotion and was constantly in the hospitals.  He continued to sit in the Chamber of Peers until the close of the trial of the Ministers, in the hope of saving the servitors of Charles X. But when Louis Philippe quitted the Palais Royal to install himself at the Tuileries, he resigned as Peer of France.  He no longer wished to reappear at the Chateau where he had seen Louis XVIII. and Charles X., and in a letter to the Queen Marie-Amelie, who had a real veneration for him, he wrote:  “My presence at the Tuileries would be out of place, and even the new hosts of that palace would be astonished at it.”  The Duke of Doudeauville, who died at a great age, in 1841, devoted his last years to good works, to charity, to the benevolent establishments of which he was the president.  One day at the Hotel de Ville, he drew applause from an assembly far from religious, by the words we are about to cite, because they discovered in them his whole mind and heart:  “A husband would like a wife reserved, economical, a good housekeeper, an excellent mother for his family, charming, eager