If I did not appreciate to the full the exceptional character of the event, I none the less looked forward to it with disproportionate excitement. On the great day I should, I knew, be the least of the nobodies; but the idea of merely sleeping under the same roof with a sovereign lord and lady, seeing them, hearing them, filled me with servile delight. I rehearsed, anticipated, literally cried aloud in my bedroom with the high joy of flunkeydom. Monarchs were sacred in my eyes. They were the Lord's Anointed. Divinity hedged them about. It was a sublimated snobbery that partook of both ecstasy and awe. Kings went to my head like wine.
The Château was all astir with preparations. The musty state-bedroom and neighbouring apartments in the unused wing were made fit for the visitors and their suite; rescued from moths—for moths. Workmen arrived from the villages, decorators from Caudebec and Rouen. Stable, kitchen and larder girded themselves for the fray. The Countess was in parlous state between the two conflicting voices of family pride and family thrift: desire to shine and desire to pare. "Oh dear, the expense" trod hard on "Of course we must do this."
In point of fact all arrangements were taken out of her hands by Elise and de Fouquier, who, working in alliance—for the family honour Elise would have worked in alliance with the Devil—were irresistible. There being no gentleman in the house, nor any male relative on good enough terms with the Countess to be imported for the occasion for certain duties, Monsieur de Fouquier almost inevitably assumed the rôle of master: he saw to the stables and carriages, arranged for the disposition of the men-servants and the arrival at the station, prepared a shoot for the Emperor. Elise's department was the Empress and her suite, the furniture and the food.
I, too, made my preparations: in the library. All I could pick up in anecdotes from the Countess or Elise, and all that books could tell me about our illustrious guests, I greedily devoured: something in the spirit of the Baedekered tourist, who learns up his *cathedrals and **magnificent views in advance, equipping himself to understand what he is to enjoy.
Wider reading made the Emperor Napoleon III dearer to me, as the perfect type of Another Person who was precisely what I should have been if I had been he: the Compleat Mary. He was a visionary whose most outrageous splendours had come true, a Mary whose madness had won.
Till now the Empress had interested me less. I began to learn that she too was a Woman of Destiny.
—On the day of her birth a great cataclysm burst over Granada, lightning and thunder such as Spain had never seen or heard.
—Above her cradle appeared that mystic sign which tells that: To be a Queen, you need not be born a Princess. That sign, shown once in many centuries, was earnest to the proud child that God had destined her for a crown. Folly?—but faith is folly come true. Dreams of greatness absorbed her. Leading lady was the one part she could play on the world's stage: the part for which the Playwright had cast her.
—One day, on a Spanish roadside, she gave charity and comfort to an old blind cripple. "It is you," he cried, "you, whom God will reward above all other women!"