Then, taking a white rose from the bouquet with which the Mayor of Biarritz had presented her, she gave it to the princess, who pressed it to her lips before pinning it to her bodice.
That same evening, the King, beaming all over his face, cried to me from a distance, the moment he saw me:
"It's all right, Paoli; the official demand has been granted. You see before you the happiest of men!"
He was indeed happy, so much so that his gaiety infected everybody around him. Each of us felt that he had some small part in this frank happiness, in this touching romance; and we felt all its charm as though our hearts were but twenty years old again. The English themselves, forgetting that their princess was about to marry a Catholic sovereign and that she would have to forswear the Protestant faith—an essential condition of the marriage—the English, usually so strict in these matters, greeted this love-match with enthusiasm. One of the British ministers gave vent to a very pretty phrase. Someone expressing surprise, in his presence, at the acquiescence shown in this connexion by King Edward's government:
"Mankind loves a lover," he replied. "Especially in England."
The days that followed upon the betrothal were days of enchantment for the young couple, now freed from all preoccupation and constraint. One met them daily, motoring along the picturesque roads of the Basque country or walking through the streets of Biarritz, stopping before the shopwindows, at the photographer's or at the pastrycook's.
"Do you know, Paoli," said the King to me, one day, "I've changed the princess's name. Instead of calling her Ena, which I don't like, I call her Nini. That's very Parisian, isn't it?"
The royal lover, as I have already said, prided himself with justice on his Parisianism, as witness the following scrap of dialogue, which took place one morning in the street at Biarritz: