The Queen's shyness? The occasion soon offered to observe it; in fact, that solemn entry into Paris was enough to make any young woman, queen or no queen, shy. The authorities wished it to be as grand as possible and sent the procession down the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne and the Champs-Élysées. No doubt, the charming sovereign was deeply impressed and a little bewildered; but the warmth of her welcome, the heartiness of the cheering afforded her, as well as her consort, a visible pleasure; and, from that very first day, she was full of pretty thoughts and he of generous movements. At a certain moment, she took a rose from a bouquet of roses de France which she was carrying and gave it to a little girl who had thrust herself close up to the carriage. He, on the other hand, walked straight to the colours of the battalion of Zouaves who were presenting arms in the courtyard of the Foreign Office and raised to his lips the folds of the standard on which were inscribed two names dear to Italian hearts and French memories alike: Magenta and Solferino.
The Foreign Office was turned into a "royal palace" for the occasion of this visit. While the government had set its wits to work to decorate in the most sumptuous style the apartments which the King and Queen of Italy were to occupy on the first floor, Madame Delcassé, the wife of the foreign minister, on her side, did her best to relieve the somewhat cold and solemn appearance of the rooms. With this object, she procured photographs of the little Princesses Yolanda and Mafalda and placed them in handsome frames on the Queen's dressing-table. The Queen was greatly touched by the delicate attention. On entering the room, she uttered a spontaneous exclamation that betrayed all a mother's fondness:
"Oh, the children! How delightful!"
The children! How often those words returned to her lips during her stay in Paris! She spoke of them incessantly, she spoke of them to everybody, to Madame Loubet, to Madame Delcassé, to the Italian ambassadress, even to the two French waiting-maids attached to her service:
"Yolanda, the elder, with her black hair and her black eyes is like me," she would explain. "Mafalda, on the other hand, is the image of her father. They both have such good little hearts."
Her maternal anxiety was also manifested in the impatience with which she used to wait for news of the princesses. Every evening, when she returned to the Foreign Office after a day of drives and visits in different parts of Paris, her first words were:
"My wire?"
And, a little nervously, she opened the telegram that wras dispatched to her daily from San Rossore, where "the children" were, and greedily read the bulletin of reassuring news which it contained.
On the morning after her arrival, she rang for a maid as soon as she woke up:
"I have an old friend in Paris," she said, "whom I want to see; it is my old French mistress, Mlle. E——. She lives on the Quai Voltaire; please have her sent for."