In a word, Queen Anéli is hasty, she is impatient.
And, in addition to that, she is uncertain. You can never tell beforehand, by any theory of probabilities based on past experience, what will or will not, on any given occasion, cause her to smile or frown. The thing she expressed a desire for yesterday, may offend her to-day, The suggestion that offended her yesterday, to-day she may welcome with joyous enthusiasm. You must approach her gingerly, tentatively; you must feel your ground.
“Oh, most dread Sovereign,” said Florimond, “if you won’t fly out at me, I would submit, humbly, that you’d better not drive this afternoon in your victoria, in your sweet new frock, for, unless all signs fail, it’s going to rain like everything.”
She didn’t fly out at him exactly; but she retorted succinctly, with a peremptory gesture, “No, it’s not going to rain,” as who should say, “It daren’t.” And she drove in her victoria, and spoiled her sweet new frock. “Not to speak of my sweet new top-hat,” sighs Florimond, who attended her; “the only Lincoln and Bennett topper in the whole length and breadth of Monterosso.”
She is hasty, she is uncertain; and then... she is intense. She talks in italics, she feels in superlatives; she admits no comparative degree, no emotional half-tones. When she is not ecstatically happy, she is desperately miserable; wonders why she was ever born into this worst of all possible worlds; wishes she were dead; and even sometimes drops dark hints of meditated suicide. When she is not in the brightest of affable humours, she is in the blackest of cross ones. She either loves a thing, or she simply can’t endure it;—the thing may be a town, a musical composition, a perfume, or a person. She either loves you, or simply can’t endure you; and she’s very apt to love you and to cease to love you alternately—or, at least, to give you to understand as much—three or four times a day. It is winter midnight or summer noon, a climate of extremes.
“Do you like the smell of tangerine-skin?”
Every evening for a week, when, at the end of dinner, the fruit was handed round, the King asked her that question; and she, never suspecting his malice, answered invariably, as she crushed a bit between her fingers, and fervidly inhaled its odour, “Oh, do I like it? I adore it. It’s perfect rapture.”
She is hasty, she is uncertain, she is intense. Will you be surprised when I go on to insist that, down deep, she is altogether well-meaning and excessively tender-hearted, and when I own that among all the women I know I can think of none other who seems to me so attractive, so fascinating, so sweetly feminine and loveable? (Oh, no, I am not in love with her, not in the least—though I don’t say that I mightn’t be, if I were a king, or she were not a queen.) If she realises that she has been unreasonable, she is the first to confess it; she repents honestly, and makes the devoutest resolutions to amend. If she discovers that she has hurt anybody’s feelings, her conscience will not give her a single second of peace, until she has sought her victim out and heaped him with benefits. If she believes that this or that distasteful task forms in very truth a part of her duty, she will go to any length of persevering self-sacrifice to accomplish it.
She has a hundred generous and kindly impulses, where she has one that is perverse or inconsiderate. Bring any case of distress or sorrow to her notice, and see how instantly her eyes soften, how eager she is to be of help. And in her affections, however mercurial she may appear on the surface, she is really constant, passionate, and, in great things, forbearing. She and her husband, for example, though they have been married perilously near ten years, are little better than a pair of sweethearts (and jealous sweethearts, at that: you should have been present on a certain evening when we had been having a long talk and laugh over old days in the Latin Quarter, and an evil spirit prompted one of us to regale her Majesty with a highly-coloured account of Theodore’s youthful infatuation for Nina Childe!... Oh, their faces! Oh, the silence! ); and then, witness her devotion to her brother, to her sisters; her fondness for Florimond, for Madame Donarowska, who was her governess when she was a girl, and now lives with her in the Palace.
“I am writing a fairy-tale,” Florimond said to her “about Princess Gugglegoo and Princess Raggle-snag.”