DEATH OF AN OLD CARDINAL.

Evening Star, Issue 6259, 7 April 1883, Page 4

DEATH OF AN OLD CARDINAL.

Cardinal Donnet, Archbishop of Bordeaux, who recently expired in France at the great age of eighty-seven, is said to have been the last representative of the Gallican Church, meaning, of course, among the hierarchy, because these ancient ideas are slow to die out. Whether he had the honor of being the sole survivor of old beliefs amid the surge of Ultramontanism or not, he was an excellent and blameless man, who won his way to the height he attained by activity, good works, a tolerant spirit, and a natural eloquence refined and enlarged by careful study. He was forty-one years old when, in 1830, Louis Philippe’s Government made him Archbishop of Bordeaux ; but he became a cardinal in 1852, when Louis Napoleon needed respectabilities to fill his Senate. Alike under the elder Bourbons, the House of Orleans, and the third Bonaparte, Donnet was popular and beloved. He also deserves some remembrance on account of a singular adventure which befell him when a young man. During an illness, his body suddenly assumed all the aspects of death. Ho was rigid, did not breathe, and his heart ceased to beat. The medical men affirmed that the youth was dead, and according to the French law he was speedily placed in his coffin, and every preparation was made for his funeral. Yet all the time he was alive, heard what was said, knew the lay and clerical folk around him; but it was not until the very last moment, just as the lid was about to be screwed down on his narrow bed, that by a desperate effort he broke the spell and sat up, to the horror of all who were near. Thus was he saved from a living entombment. It was in the Senate, when arguing against such rapid burial, that Cardinal Donnet related his own experience to astonished listeners. Few men have had a similar escape. How many have been literally buried alive I—English paper.