[539] The Duc de Blacas d'Aulps (cf. Vol. III. p. 100, n. 1) had followed King Charles X. into exile and exercised a preponderating influence over the little Court in Prague. He died in Prague on the 17th of November 1839.—B.
[540] Anne Hyacinthe Maxence Baron de Damas (1785-1862) was only six years old when he emigrated from France with his family. At the age of ten, he was entered as a cadet in the artillery-school in St. Petersburg; he served with distinction in the Russian Army and was a brigadier-general in 1813. At the First Restoration, he was attached to the Duc d'Angoulême as a lord of the Bed-chamber and aide-de-camp. Louis XVIII. made him a lieutenant-general in 1815. In the Spanish Campaign of 1823, at the head of a division, he handled his troops so well that, at Llers and Llado (15 and 16 September), he captured a whole column of the enemy. In reward for his services, the Baron de Damas was created a peer of France, on the 9th of October 1823, and appointed Minister for War on the 19th of the same month. One year later, he succeeded Chateaubriand at the Foreign Office; and, in 1828, he found himself involved in the fall of the Villèle Cabinet. In 1827, after the death of the Duc de Rivière, he became Governor to the Duc de Bordeaux, followed his pupil into exile, and retained his functions till 1833. In 1834, he retired to his estate of Hautefort and devoted the remainder of his life to passionate well-doing.—B.
[541] The Cardinal de Latil (cf. p. 18, n. 3, supra) was First Chaplain to Charles X., followed his master into exile, and did not return to France until 1836, after the King's death. He himself died in 1839, in the same year as the Duc de Blacas.—B.
[542] August Heinrich Julius Lafontaine (1759-1831), author of a number of novels of a domestic character which attained a great popularity.—T.
[543] Cf. Molière: L'Avare, Act II. sc. i.—T.
[544] Maximilian I. King of Bavaria (1756-1825).—T.
[545] Maria Wilhelmina Augusta of Hesse-Dannstadt, Queen of Bavaria (1765-1796), is, I presume, the Queen referred to: Maximilian's second consort, Frederica Carolina Wilhelmina of Baden (1776-1841) did not die till eight years later.—T.
[546] Silvio Pellico (1788-1854), an Italian poet and prose-writer, arrested as a Carbonaro in 1820 and imprisoned for two years in Milan and Venice. In 1822, he was condemned to death, but his sentence was commuted and he was kept as a prisoner, from 1822 to 1830, at the Spielberg, near Brünn. Pellico's chief works are his tragedies, Francesca da Rimini and Laodamia, and his autobiographical work, Le mie Prigioni (1833), which achieved an immense popularity throughout Europe.—T.
[547] The two last syllables of the German Bitte für uns! and the French espérance form a rough rhyme.—T.
[548] Henry VII. King of England (1457-1509) united the Houses of Lancaster (in his own person) and York (in that of his wife, Queen Elizabeth, daughter of Edward IV.). He was noted for his avarice.—T.