Now, supposing the titles of Comte de Joinville, a great French nobleman belonging in 1773 to a reigning family to be united in a single person, who would not at once recognize Louis-Philippe-Joseph?
3rd. The Description. The Comte de Joinville, the Italian witnesses tell us, had a fine figure; he was rather stout, had a brownish complexion, a red and pimply nose, and splendid legs.
But is not this the exact description of the Duc de Chartres as given me by the Abbé de Saint-Fare, who was his natural brother? A description agreeing completely with that of all who knew him. Here is one among many written by a man who had, so to speak, always lived with him—
“Louis-Philippe-Joseph was a fine man in every sense of the word. His figure, of more than middle height, was gracefully and faultlessly proportioned. The lower part of his body, from the waist downwards, could not have been better made; the rest was rather heavy, but this stoutness was not ungraceful.
“As a result of his debauches, his nose and the lower part of his forehead were covered with small red pimples; and this sort of mask, which in fact disfigured him, but which he owed to his dissolute life and not to nature, made many people say that his face was hideous.”[27]
4th. Character. The Comte de Joinville’s habits led him to extreme familiarity with people of low condition, and to great generosity where the success of his ambitious projects was concerned; the positive evidence of witnesses, his sudden intimacy with the jailer, and the presents he made him, leave no room for doubt on that question. But by these signs how can we do anything but believe in the portrait drawn by all historians alike of the Duc de Chartres?
“He loved,” they say, “to mix with the crowd, and was never so happy as when he was able to cast off restraint and etiquette; he had a lively and caustic wit, liked to banter his inferiors, and showed no displeasure at their bantering him. Despite the avarice of which he gave so many proofs, which went so far as to make him say that ‘a crown in his pocket was worth more to him than all public esteem,’ he made no difficulty in scattering his sordid gains with profusion, either to obtain nominations to the States-General or to gain the affection of the great nation he wished to captivate.”[28]
5th. The Circumstances. We have seen that the Comte de Joinville had some reason to fear that his wife would never give him a male child, and that, in that case, he was afraid of losing a great inheritance absolutely depending on the birth of a son.
Now all the world knows that, in 1773, the Duchesse de Chartres, though in the full bloom of her radiant youth, had, in the four years of her marriage, borne only one daughter, who died at birth on the 10th of October, 1771.[29]
Her ambitious and covetous husband must therefore have greatly dreaded not only the fading away of his flattering hope of winning for his line the good graces of his compatriots, so as to obtain from them the happy transference of that crown of France, the object of so many longings, so many intrigues, so many secret manœuvres—it may be obscure crimes—but also to fail in concentrating on his family the whole affection of his father-in-law, the richest of princes, who, still only forty-eight years old, had, since the death of his wife,[30] pretty often shown his intention of contracting a second alliance.[31]