After dinner, we stood round a large room while the Kings and Queens, the Emperor and Empresses and Princesses, went round and talked to the guests; and this was the end of a tiring day.
A few days later the King came to luncheon at the Legation.
There was one other Royal arrival which I shall never forget. I cannot place its date, but I think it must have been Queen Alexandra’s first visit as Queen to Copenhagen. But what I remember is this, that while we were waiting on the station platform, Queen Alexandra descended from the train all in black, with long floating veils, and threaded her way through the crowd of Royalties and officials, looking younger than anyone present, with still the same fairy-tale-like grace of carriage and movement that I remembered as a child, and with the same youthful smile of welcome, and with all her delicacy of form and feature heightened by her mourning and her long black veils, whose floating intricacy were obedient and docile to the undefinable rhythm of her beauty, and I remember thinking of Donne’s lines:
“No spring, no summer beauty has such grace
As I have seen in one autumnal face.”
I spent that Christmas at Copenhagen, and on the 7th of January 1902 a dispatch came to say I had been transferred from the post of a Third Secretary at His Majesty’s Legation at Copenhagen to that of a Third Secretary of His Majesty’s Embassy at Rome. Before I left Copenhagen I had finished an article on Taine, an article on modern French literature, and an article on Sully Prudhomme, for the new edition of the British Encyclopædia.
CHAPTER XII
SARAH BERNHARDT
I said that Sarah Bernhardt should have a chapter to herself.