It is a great mercy that the children of his Royal Highness, who
happened to be in the late forts round Paris, (before the bombardment
which has so happily ended in their destruction,) had returned to their
father before the commencement of the cannonading. They will continue,
as heretofore, to be the most loyal supporters of order and the throne.
"None can read without tears in their eyes our august monarch's
proclamation.
"'Louis, by &c.--
"'My children! After nine hundred and ninety-nine years of captivity, I
am restored to you. The cycle of events predicted by the ancient Magi,
and the planetary convolutions mentioned in the lost Sibylline books,
have fulfilled their respective idiosyncrasies, and ended (as always in
the depths of my dungeons I confidently expected) in the triumph of the
good Angel, and the utter discomfiture of the abominable Blue Dragon.
"'When the bombarding began, and the powers of darkness commenced their
hellish gunpowder evolutions, I was close by--in my palace of Charenton,
three hundred and thirty-three thousand miles off, in the ring of
Saturn--I witnessed your misery. My heart was affected by it, and I
said, "Is the multiplication-table a fiction? are the signs of the
Zodiac mere astronomers' prattle?"
"'I clapped chains, shrieking and darkness, on my physician, Dr.
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