“Nonsense, Conneau! You don’t know Hebrew, and you are not the man to go into ecstasies over a Bible, even a French one. Well?”
“It is a magnificent edition, published at Venice in 1551—printed by Giustinani.”
“Well?”
“Sire, do I laugh at you when, at Champlieu, or elsewhere—in some camp of Cæsar or other—you pick up old tiles, Roman or pretended Roman; antique things without form or colour, broken vases which have been used for Heaven knows what purpose? However, you put them carefully in glass cases or in the museums, and you like people to look at them. Everybody has his own hobby.”
“Oh, my poor potteries!” sighed the Emperor. “How they abuse you!”
He laid down the tongs, and, after rolling a cigarette, took up a fragment of an amphora which had been found during the excavation of a Merovingian tomb near Soissons. It was a common-looking piece of clay, without a vestige of decoration. But he held it up to the light, and examined it with all the tenderness of a connoisseur, while Conneau, with loving hands, turned the leaves of his beautiful Bible, in which some amateur had intercalated several rudely-executed pictures.
Less than three years after the imperial nuptials a very distinguished Englishwoman was the guest of their Majesties. Her son, Lord Ronald Sutherland Gower, wrote:
In October, 1855, my mother[53] took me over to Paris for the first time. We visited the Tuileries and Versailles. During one of our expeditions to some gallery or exhibition the Empress recognized my mother, although she only knew her from her likeness to her portrait by Winterhalter, the lithographs of which were in the printsellers’ windows, and immediately invited her to dine at St. Cloud, where the Court then was. My mother had known the Emperor slightly, for on a previous visit [of the Duchess] to Paris he had called on her at Meurice’s Hotel. Although charmed by the beauty and grace of the Empress, my mother had little liking for the imperial Court of France or its master.
In the great year 1867 Lord Ronald, like thousands of English people, went to Paris for the Exhibition. “It was the apogee of the Second Empire—of the Empire that smelt half of gunpowder and half of patchouli. Maximilian’s death was not then known at the Tuileries. Napoleon III. was then host to all the Sovereigns of the Continent, and yet within three short years all was in the dust.”