daughter, by the way, it is that the house of Savoy, _i.e._ of
Sardinia, has pretensions to the English throne.) This unhappy lady, it
is too well established, was poisoned. Voltaire, amongst many others,
has affected to doubt the fact; for which in his time there might be
some excuse. But since then better evidences have placed the matter
beyond all question. We now know both the fact, and the how, and the
why. The Duke, who probably was no party to the murder of his young
wife, though otherwise on bad terms with her, married for his second
wife a coarse German princess, homely in every sense, and a singular
contrast to the elegant creature whom he had lost. She was a daughter
of the Bavarian Elector; ill-tempered by her own confession, self-
willed, and a plain speaker to excess; but otherwise a woman of honest
German principles. Unhappy she was through a long life; unhappy through
the monotony as well as the malicious intrigues of the French court;
and so much so, that she did her best (though without effect) to
prevent her Bavarian niece from becoming dauphiness. She acquits her
husband, however, in the memoirs which she left behind, of any
intentional share in her unhappiness; she describes him constantly as a
well-disposed prince. But whether it were, that often walking in the
dusk through the numerous apartments of that vast mansion which her
husband had so much enlarged, naturally she turned her thoughts to the
injured lady who had presided there before herself; or whether it arose
from the inevitable gloom which broods continually over mighty palaces,
so much is known for certain, that one evening, in the twilight, she
met, at a remote quarter of the reception-rooms, something that she
conceived to be a spectre. What she fancied to have passed on that
occasion, was never known except to her nearest friends; and if she
made any explanations in her memoirs, the editor has thought fit to
suppress them. She mentions only, that in consequence of some ominous
circumstances relating to the title of _Valois_, which was the