On its return from exile the royal family of France consisted of:
The King’s brother, the Comte d’Artois, and his two sons:
The Comte d’Artois, the presumptive heir to the throne, was born in 1757, and was consequently fifty-seven years old on his return to Paris. He was ultra-Royalistic in his political views and was considered the head of the extremists. His eldest son, the Duc d’Angoulême, was born in 1775, and had retired from France with his father at the commencement of the Revolution. He was a man of very mediocre ability, but of exemplary character. In 1799 he was married to his cousin Marie-Thérèse-Charlotte, daughter of Louis the Sixteenth, who had passed her unhappy childhood in prison, which she had left only in 1795. She was worshipped by the entire royal family as an angel of kindness and mercy. They had no children.
The younger son, the Duc de Berry, was born in 1778, and had passed his youth and early manhood in exile. He had a more manly character than his brother, and the French nobility of the old _régime_ looked upon him as the hope of the Bourbon dynasty. Far from being a genius, the Duc de Berry was a man of good intelligence, brave, dashing, and the very type of a French officer, prior to the Revolution. He had many of the generous traits, but also some of the vices of that elegant and high-spirited class of young men. While living in exile, in England, he formed a liaison with a young Englishwoman, who bore him two daughters, to whom he was greatly attached and whom he took to Paris and placed in a young ladies’ academy. In 1816 the King married him to a Neapolitan princess, Caroline, daughter of the Crown Prince of that kingdom, a handsome, high-spirited, healthy young woman, who gave promise of giving the dynasty direct heirs. The newly married couple lived very happily together, and enjoyed life in the French capital to its fullest extent. They were really the official representatives of royalty and its splendors,--neither the King nor the Duc d’Angoulême caring much for the entertainments, balls, and receptions of court life. The prominence thus given to the Duc de Berry, and the expectation that through him the elder line of the Bourbons would be continued explain fully why he was singled out as the victim of assassination. He was not only identified with the extreme Royalists, so odious to the people, but, with him out of the way, it was only a question of time when the elder branch of the dynasty would die out entirely, no more issue being expected from the Duc d’Angoulême, who had been married already twenty years without having children. Such were at least the considerations of the young man who undertook the perilous task of killing the Duc de Berry, and who fully accomplished his purpose.