So passes the glory of the world. It is not a good thing to be born in a palace, nor to live in one.
It was in the Rue Lafayette that John Turner had his office, and when he emerged from it into that long street on the evening of the 25th of August, 1850, he ran against, or he was rather run against by, the newsboy who shrieked as he pattered along in lamentable boots and waved a sheet in the face of the passer: “The King is dead! The King is dead!”
And Paris—the city that soon forgets—smiled and asked what King?
Louis Philippe was dead in England, at the age of seventy-seven, the bad son of a bad father, another of those adventurers whose happy hunting-ground always has been, always will be, France.
John Turner, like many who are slow in movement, was quick in thought. He perceived at once that the death of Louis Philippe left the field open to the next adventurer; for he left behind him no son of his own mettle.
Turner went back to his office, where the pen with which he had signed a cheque for four hundred pounds, payable to the Reverend Septimus Marvin, was still wet; where, at the bottom of the largest safe, the portrait of an unknown lady of the period of Louis XVI lay concealed. He wrote out a telegram to Mrs. St. Pierre Lawrence, addressed to her at her villa near Royan, and then proceeded to his dinner with the grave face of the careful critic.
The next morning he received the answer, at his breakfast-table, in the apartment he had long occupied in the Avenue d’Antin. But he did not open the envelope. He had telegraphed to Mrs. St. Pierre Lawrence, asking if it would be convenient for her to put him up for a few days. And he suspected that it would not.
“When I am gone,” he said to his well-trained servant, “put that into an envelope and send it after me to the Villa Cordouan, Royan. Pack my portmanteau for a week.”
Thus John Turner set out southward to join a party of those Royalists whom his father before him had learnt to despise. And in a manner he was pre-armed; for he knew that he would not be welcome. It was in those days a long journey, for the railway was laid no farther than Tours, from whence the traveller must needs post to La Rochelle, and there take a boat to Royan—that shallow harbour at the mouth of the Gironde.
“Must have a change—of cooking,” he explained to Mrs. St. Pierre Lawrence. “Doctor says I am getting too stout.”