The engagement being arranged, the two families interested (mine especially), the Queen on the one hand, and the Princess Clémentine on the other, decided that my marriage was not to be celebrated until twelve months later. I was so young!
My fiancé was fourteen years older than I. Fourteen years' difference is not perhaps of much account between a young woman of twenty-five and a man of thirty-nine; it is a great deal, however, between an innocent girl of seventeen and a lover of thirty-one.
I had only occasional glimpses of my fiancé during his rapid visits to Brussels. Our conversations were of no account; they were merely such as a man of his age would hold with a girl of mine. But I thought I knew him well. We were cousins. This constituted the first difficulty, as the sanction of the Church of Rome was necessary to the marriage. It was asked for and obtained. This is the custom in such cases.
My fiancé left me to complete the studies necessary for my successful début in a strange world. And what a world! The most courtly of Courts in the universe. A Court haunted by the shades of Charles V and Maria Theresa! A Court in which Spanish etiquette was allied to German discipline. An emperor whose greatness had been increased rather than diminished by his military reverses, so well did he bear his misfortunes. An empress who was a Queen of Queens owing to her undisputed perfections. And around them a host of archdukes and archduchesses, princes, dukes and gentlemen bearing the highest titles in the land.
All this was very impressive for a Belgian princess who did not regret her short dresses, because one never regrets them when it is the fashion to wear long gowns, but who was nevertheless very astonished to find herself dressed like a grown-up girl.
However, I was not embarrassed, nor was I nervous; I looked at everything with the eyes of a girl who is only interested in her engagement and her lover.
I would have married the prince, had I been asked to do so, on the same day that I received his first ring. I would have gone before the burgomaster and the cardinal with just the same eagerness as I did a year later.
Healthy in body and pure in spirit, brought up in an atmosphere of sincerity and morality under the care of an incomparable mother, but deprived, owing to my rank, of more or less enlightened friends who would have reposed certain womanly confidences in me, I gave my whole soul to my approaching marriage without troubling myself what marriage might mean. I was no longer a creature of this earth. I created a star where my fiancé and I would live together in a divine atmosphere of happiness. The man who was to be my companion on the enchanted road of life, seemed to me the embodiment of all that was beautiful, loyal, generous, and I deemed him as innocent as myself.
My hours of martyrdom and the distressing quarrels were to come later when the inmost recesses of my heart were disclosed by the barbarians of the police court, who made scandalous use of my letters written after my engagement. These letters expressed my love. I had written to the man who was my parents' choice as I would have written to an archangel destined to marry me. I adorned him with the beauty of my most beautiful desires. I transfigured him.
The savages had the effrontery to deduce from these expressions of affection that I was an unstable and deceitful creature.