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De Ramezay came over as a captain in the army with the Viceroy de Tracy, and was remarkable for his highly refined education, having been a pupil of the celebrated Fénélon, who was said to have been the pattern of virtue in the midst of a corrupt court, and who was entrusted by Louis the Fourteenth with the education of his grandsons, the Dukes of Burgundy, Anjou and Berri.
He is, nevertheless, unworthy of the honour which was conferred on him; for he was only a captain in the King's Guard. The women all ran after him; but, for my part, I find him extremely disagreeable; he has an unhealthy air and looks like one of the Indian figures upon a screen. He was not here when Madame de Berri died, but was with the army, in the regiment which had been bought for him.
It was the marriage of Madame de Berri that effected this surprising change in the Dauphine. Seeing that young lady did not make herself beloved, and began things in the wrong way, she was desirous to make herself more liked and esteemed than she was.
The Duchesse d'Orleans has been for some days past persuading my son to go masked to a ball. She says that his daughter, the Duchesse de Berri, and I, make him pass for a coward by preventing him from going to balls and running about the town by night as he used to do before; and that he ought not to manifest the least symptom of fear.
When the Electoral Prince of Saxony came hither, he addressed a pretty compliment to the King, which we all thought was his own, and we therefore conceived a very favourable notion of his parts. He did not, however, keep up that good opinion, and probably the compliment was made for him by the Elector-Palatine. The King desired the Duchesse de Berri to show him about Marly.
Prudence did not permit him to remain any longer at Chantilly, and it behoved him to place himself beyond the risk of a coup-de-main by withdrawing to his government of Berri, whither he had already sent his son, his wife, and his sister. It was, it is true, the road to Guienne, but he might stop there.
And when he and the Duke Berri, at the instigation of the archbishop, were compelled to resign the reins to the young King Charles VI., they carried with them to their own castles all that Anjou had left. Of course the archbishop was mysteriously murdered, and then the boy king was married to Isabella of Bavaria, said to be the most beautiful and the wickedest woman in Europe.
The unfortunate square piano had had no pity shown it; more out of tune and asthmatic than ever, it was now always open, and one could read above the yellow and worn-out keyboard a once famous name- "Sebastian Erard, Manufacturer of Pianos and Harps for S.A.R. Madame la Duchesse de Berri."
In February,1820, a fresh tragedy befell the royal family in the assassination of the Duc de Berri, brother-in-law of the Duchesse d'Angouleme, as he was seeing his wife into her carriage at the door of the Opera-house.
The poor Duchesse de Berri was as much the cause of her own death as if she had blown her brains out, for she secretly ate melons, figs and milk; she herself confessed, and her doctor told me, that she had closed her room to him and to the other medical attendants for a fortnight that she might indulge in this way. Immediately after the storm she began to die.
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