The grandest thing of all was a State ball in Versailles;—that magnificent but mournful, almost monumental pile, being gaily decorated and illuminated—almost transformed out of its tragic traditions. What a charming picture of her hostess the Queen gives us:
"The Empress met us at the top of the staircase, looking like a fairy queen, or nymph, in a white dress, trimmed with grass and diamonds,—a beautiful tour de corsage of diamonds round the top of her dress;—the same round her waist, and a corresponding coiffure, with her Spanish and Portuguese orders."
She must have been a lovely vision. The Emperor thought so, for (according to the Queen) forgetting that it is not "good form" for a man to admire or compliment his own wife, he exclaimed, as she appeared: "Comme tu es belle! " ("How beautiful you are!")
I am afraid he was not always so polite. During her first season at the Tuileries, which she called "a beautiful prison," and which is now as much a thing of the past as the Bastile, she often in her gay, impulsive way offended against the stern laws of Court etiquette, and was reproved for a lack of dignity. Once at a reception she suddenly perceived a little way down the line an old school-friend, and, hurrying forward, kissed her affectionately. It was nice for the young lady, but the Emperor frowned and said, in that cold marital tone which cuts like an east wind: "Madame, you forget that you are the Empress!"
In a letter from the Prince to his uncle Leopold I find this suggestive sentence in reference to the ball at Versailles: "Victoria made her toilette in Marie Antoinette's boudoir." It would almost seem the English Queen might have feared to see in her dressing-glass a vision of the French Queen's proud young head wearing a diadem as brilliant as her own, or perhaps that cruel crown of silver—her terror-whitened hair.
The parting was sad. The Empress "could not bring herself to face it"; so the Queen went to her room with the Emperor, who said: "Eugénie, here is the Queen." "Then," adds Her Majesty, "she came and gave me a beautiful fan and a rose and heliotrope from the garden, and Vicky a bracelet set with rubies and diamonds containing her hair, with which Vicky was delighted."
The Emperor went with them all the way to Boulogne and saw them on board their yacht; then came embracings and adieux, and all was over.
The next morning early they reached Osborne and were received at the beach by Prince Alfred and his little brothers, to whom Albert Edward, big with the wonders of Paris, was like a hero out of a fairy book. Near the house waited the sisters, Helena and Louise, and in the house the invalid—"poor, dear Alice!"—for whom the joy of that return was almost too much.
CHAPTER XXV.
Betrothal of the Princess Royal—Birth of the Prince Imperial of France— More visitors and visitings—The Emperor And Empress of Mexico—Marriage of the Princess Royal—The attendant festivities.