Students and grisettes, artisans and their sweethearts, might exclaim at the beauty of the Empress and the splendor of her jewels. Not one woman envied her—not one man would have changed places with him. Wherever his puffy face and leaden eyes turned, as he bowed from side to side with the mechanical courtesy of a clockwork puppet or the Mandarin of China—not a hat was raised—not a handkerchief waved,—not a voice wished him long life or happiness. The regard that met his was as bleak, and cold, and nipping as the bitter January day.
He could intern those who had offended him in distant provincial townships. In cells of civil prisons, in dungeons of Military Fortresses, he could immure others, for the term of their natural lives. He could sentence yet others to be hugged to death by the Red Widow, or have them shot; and he did constantly. But none the more could he make the people cheer.
There were faces more exalted that as coldly regarded his pretensions. To wit, those Reigning Monarchs, parents of marriageable daughters who had declined the honor of his hand. Also the young Emperor of Austria, and the King of Prussia, and more formidable than all these put together, the grim Colossus of the icy North.
By Nicholas Romanoff, Autocrat of all the Russias,—who lived as plainly as the humblest of his soldiers, and died on a sack of leather stuffed with hay—the Tsar to whom Monsiegneur—when merely Monsiegneur—had made secret and ineffectual overtures with a view to the dismemberment and division of the Ottoman Empire—the brand-new Imperial Majesty of France was treated with a distant civility that galled and stung—as possibly it was meant to do.
England, the ancient, tried, and proven ally of Russia, was presently to bind herself in monstrous alliance with the crowned adventurer. The chaste Victoria was to dance at his Embassy—visit his capital—kiss him upon both cheeks—strange pasture for lips so stainless!—and call him “Sire my Brother.”
But to Nicholas—until he became “Sire my Enemy,” he was never to be anything but “Sire my Friend.”
LXXIII
In the summer of the fateful year of 1853, a city of canvas tents sprang up, like a growth of giant mushrooms, on Chobham Common, and the evolutions of the troops encamped thereon, converted that usually bare and arid expanse of heath into the semblance of a vast market-garden crammed with perambulatory beds of the gayest and most flaunting flowers. Ere long a Grand Military Display took place under the eyes of British Royalty and various Foreign Crowned Heads—not to mention a hundred thousand representatives of the British Public, whom coaches, carriages, brakes, vans, gigs, market-carts, shandrydans, nags, and the humble efforts of Shank’s Mare had brought to the scene of action.
Do you hear the trumpets crying and the bugles calling, and the batteries of the Royal Artillery thundering from the sandy heights overlooking the arena of mimic warfare? while withering volleys of blank cartridge from a line of white-duck trousered Infantry two miles long, shattered the glass of windows at Bagshot Hall (and, it is said, at Farnborough) and—to the profound relief of the Special Artists employed by the illustrated newspapers—caused the subsequent charge of the Cavalry Brigade commanded by H.R.H. the Duke of Bambridge, to be executed under cover of a dense and impenetrable cloud of smoke, jagged through with spurting jets of fire.
The same sort of thing—strange to record—was taking place on the other side of the Channel. Upon the extensive green billiard-table of the Bruyeres, sufficiently near the French Military barrack-camp of Helfaut, the training-maneuvers of some ten thousand representatives of every service branch of the French Army were duly succeeded by a Grand Inspection, carried out by Monsiegneur the Marshal de St. Arnaud, Minister of War. A sham battle followed in the presence of the Emperor and Empress, fresh from a triumphal tour throughout the North of France.