He died of dissipation and disappointment, and under the pseudonym of the Duke de Morra, Daudet celebrated him in "The Nabob." De Morny did not live to see the tumble of the house of cards he had built.

Next after I saw Paris it was a pitiful wreck indeed; the Hotel de Ville and the Tuileries in flames; the Column gone from the Place Vendome; but later the rise of the Third Republic saw the revival of the unquenchable spirit of the irrepressible French.
Nevertheless I should scarcely be taken for a Parisian.

Once, when wandering aimlessly, as one so often does through the Paris streets, one of the touts hanging round the Cafe de la Paix to catch the unwary stranger being a little more importunate than usual, I ordered him to go about his business.
"This is my business," he impudently answered.
"Get away, I tell you!" I thundered, "I am a Parisian myself!" He drew a little out of reach of the umbrella I held in my hand, and with a drawl of supreme and very American contempt, exclaimed, "Well, you don't look it," and scampered off.
Paris, however, is not all of France.

Sometimes I have thought not the best part of it.

There is the south of France, with Avignon, the heart of Provence, seat of the French papacy six hundred years ago, the metropolis of Christendom before the Midi was a region--Paris yet a village, and Rome struggling out of the debris of the ages--with Arles and Nimes, and, above all, Tarascon, the home of the immortal Tartarin, for next-door neighbors.