In the meantime, the people, perfectly aware that the returned exiles were impoverished, were paying taxes to maintain foreign troops which were in France for the sole purpose of enabling the king's government to accomplish these things! Here was material enough for discord in a troubled reign which lasted nine years.

Louis XVIII.

died September 16, 1824; and the Count of Artois, the brother of two kings, was proclaimed Charles X.of France.
If there had been any doubt about the real sentiments of Louis XVIII., it must have been dispelled by the last act of his reign, when, at the bidding of the Holy Alliance, he sent French soldiers to put down the Spanish liberals in their fight for a constitution.
But Charles X.did not intend to assume the thin mask worn by his brother.

He had marked out a different course.

All disguise was to be thrown aside in a Bourbon reign of the ante-revolutionary sort.