Opposite to me was General Rulhières, an ex-peer, the Representative Conti and Lucien Murat. The other guests were unknown to me. Among them was a young major of cavalry, decorated with the Legion of Honour. This major alone was in uniform; the others wore evening dress. The Prince had a rosette of the Legion of Honour in his buttonhole.
Everybody conversed with his neighbour. Louis Bonaparte appeared to prefer his neighbour on the right to his neighbour on the left. The Marquise de Hallays is thirty-six years old, and looks her age. Fine eyes, not much hair, an ugly mouth, white skin, a shapely neck, charming arms, the prettiest little hands in the world, admirable shoulders. At present she is separated from M. de Hallays. She has had eight children, the first seven by her husband. She was married fifteen years ago. During the early period of their marriage she used to fetch her husband from the drawing-room, even in the daytime, and take him off to bed. Sometimes a servant would enter and say: “Madame the Marquise is asking for Monsieur the Marquis.” The Marquis would obey the summons. This made the company who happened to be present laugh. To-day the Marquis and Marquise have fallen out.
“She was the mistress of Napoleon, son of Jerome, you know,” said Prince de la Moskowa to me, sotto voce, “now she is Louis’s mistress.”
“Well,” I answered, “changing a Napoleon for a Louis is an everyday occurrence.”
These bad puns did not prevent me from eating and observing.
The two women seated beside the President had square-topped chairs. The President’s chair was surmounted with a little round top. As I was about to draw some inference from this I looked at the other chairs and saw that four or five guests, myself among them, had chairs similar to that of the President. The chairs were covered with red velvet with gilt headed nails. A more serious thing I noticed was that everybody addressed the President of the Republic as “Monseigneur” and “your Highness.” I who had called him “Prince,” had the air of a demagogue.
When we rose from table the Prince asked after my wife, and then apologized profusely for the rusticity of the service.
“I am not yet installed,” he said. “The day before yesterday, when I arrived here, there was hardly a mattress for me to sleep upon.”
The dinner was a very ordinary one, and the Prince did well to excuse himself. The service was of common white china and the silverware bourgeois, worn, and gross. In the middle of the table was a rather fine vase of craquelé, ornamented with ormolu in the bad taste of the time of Louis XVI.
However, we heard music in an adjoining hall.