--a king coming now for the first time, as
Alexandre Lenoir remarks, to take a place in the vault of these
vanished princes, whose ranks are no longer crowded, and which
crime has been more prompt to scatter than has Death been to fill
them; also the coffin of Louise de Vaudemont, wife of Henry III.,
the queen who was buried in the Church of the Capucins, Place
Vendome, and whose remains escaped profanation in 1793. In this
same vault were also two little coffins, those of a daughter and a
son of the Duke and Duchess of Berry, who died, one in 1817, the
other in 1818, immediately after birth, and the coffin of their
father, assassinated the 13th of February, 1820, on leaving the
Opera. Such were the companions in burial of Louis XVIII.
IV
THE FUNERAL OF LOUIS XVIII
Louis XVIII. died the 16th of September, 1824, at the Chateau of
the Tuileries. His body remained there until the 23d of September,
when, to the sound of a salvo of one hundred and one guns, it was
borne to the Church of Saint-Denis. The coffin remained exposed in
this basilica within a chapelle ardente, to the 24th of October,
the eve of the day fixed for the obsequies, and during all this
time the church was filled with a crowd of the faithful, belonging
to all classes of society, who gathered from Paris and all the
surrounding communes, to render a last homage to the old King.
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