Explore "Forget-me-not" by Marjorie Bowen on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
The King walked up and down one of the galleries of the Tuileries, a bundle of newspapers under his arm; disease had thickened his once graceful figure to a stoutness that was daily turned to ridicule by the venom of the caricaturists. In the not undignified person of Louis Philippe, the careful benevolence of the professional democrat was tempered by hereditary pride, indolence and obstinacy; as, affecting to found his monarchy on the love of his people, he had never dared to use force, he had been obliged to support his power by strategy and all the ramifications of political corruption. Never had a Bourbon lived through so many vicissitudes nor a King of France been through so many sordid experiences.
His civilian dress, ostentatiously devoid of any touch of grandeur, his air of easy, unceremonious good humour, showed the citizen King appealing for the sufferance of his dear countrymen, but he remained a royal Prince, surrounded by an aristocracy modelled, as far as he dare, on that of the _ancien régime_, and he knew, despite his elaborate devices to gain popularity, that he was as despised and resented as any of these tyrants whose lilies he had erased with such servility from his escutcheon.