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"When it is God's will, these mysterious beings may be a Moses, an Attila, Charlemagne, Mahomet, or Napoleon; but when He leaves a generation of these stupendous tools to rust at the bottom of the ocean, they are no more than a Pugatschef, a Fouche, a Louvel, or the Abbe Carlos Herrera. Gifted with immense power over tenderer souls, they entrap them and mangle them.
As the duke was returning to the opera, an assassin, by the name of Louvel, who had been lying in wait for him, sprang from the darkness of a projecting wall, and seizing the duke by the shoulder with one hand, with the other plunged a dagger to the hilt in his side. It was the deed of an instant, and the assassin, in the darkness, fled, leaving the dagger in the side of the victim.
The Cafe Lemblin stood up for the Emperor, against the Cafe Valois, which upheld the Bourbons. The Duc de Berri, already surveyed from the shadow by Louvel, had just been married to a princess of Sicily. Madame de Stael had died a year previously. The body-guard hissed Mademoiselle Mars. The grand newspapers were all very small. Their form was restricted, but their liberty was great.
The Duc de Berri was assassinated by a man named Louvel, Feb. 13, 1820, as he was handing his wife into her carriage at the door of the French Opera House.
"I was, for my sins, very intimate with the late Duc d'Otranto; I have worked for Louis XVIII. when he was on the throne; and, when he was exiled, for the Emperor and for the Directory. You have the tenacity of Louvel, the best political instrument I ever met with; but you are as supple as the prince of diplomates. And what auxiliaries you have!
According to Rayer, a woman by the name of Perat, summoned before the Chamber of Peers to give evidence in the trial of the assassin Louvel, was so much affected that her hair became entirely white in a single night Byron makes mention of this peculiar anomaly in the opening stanzas of the "Prisoner of Chillon:" "My hair is gray, but not with years, Nor grew it white In a single night.
This passage joins that of the better cells; and it is worth noting that the cell in which Louvel was imprisoned, one of the most famous of the regicides, is the room at the right angle formed by the junction of the two corridors.
There was a slight gasping, a convulsive shuddering passed over his frame, and the spirit of the duke took its flight to the judgment-seat of Christ. The remains were conveyed, with much funereal pageantry, to the vaults of St. Denis, the ancient mausoleum of the kings of France. Louvel, a miserable fanatic, who sought notoriety by the murder of a prince, expiated his crime upon the scaffold.
On the trial it was proved by evidence that Louvel had no accomplices, and that he was alone in the conception as in the execution of his crime. But it was also evident that hatred against the Bourbons had possessed the soul and armed the hand of the murderer.
"When it is God's will, these mysterious beings may be a Moses, an Attila, Charlemagne, Mahomet, or Napoleon; but when He leaves a generation of these stupendous tools to rust at the bottom of the ocean, they are no more than a Pugatschef, a Fouche, a Louvel, or the Abbe Carlos Herrera. Gifted with immense power over tenderer souls, they entrap them and mangle them.
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