e were two hundred thousand sightseers
in Paris that day, in addition to the usual population.

The empress wore upon her golden hair the crown that the First
Napoleon had placed upon the head of Marie Louise. The body of
the church was filled with men,--ambassadors, military and naval
officers, and high officials. Their wives were in the galleries.
As the great doors of the cathedral were opened to admit the bridal
procession, a broad path of light gleamed from the door up to the
altar, adding additional brilliancy to the glittering scene. Up
the long aisle the emperor led his bride, flashing with the light
of jewels, among them the unlucky regent diamond, which glittered
on her bosom. After the Spanish fashion, she crossed her brow,
her lips, her heart, her thumb, as she knelt for the nuptial
benediction. The ceremony over, the archbishop conducted the married
pair to the porch of the cathedral, and they drove along the Quai
to the Tuileries.

The first favor the empress asked of her husband was the pardon
of more than four thousand unfortunate persons still exiled or
imprisoned for their share in the risings that succeeded the _coup
d'etat_.

When Washington Irving heard of the marriage, he wrote: "Louis
Napoleon and Eugenie de Montijo,--Emperor and Empress of France!
He whom I received as an exile at my cottage on the Hudson, she
whom at Granada I have dandled on my knee! The last I saw of Eugenie
de Montijo, she and her gay circle had swept away a charming young
girl, beautiful and accomplished, my dear young friend, into their
career of fashionable dissipation. Now Eugenie is on a throne,
and the other a voluntary recluse in a convent of one of the most
rigorous Orders." This convent is near Biarritz, where the nuns
take vows of silence like the monks of La Trappe.[1] The empress
when at Biarritz never failed to visit her former friend, who was
permitted to converse with her.

[Footnote 1: Saturday Review, 1885.]

The beautiful woman thus raised to the imperial throne[2] was a
mixed character,--not so perfect as some have represented her,
but entirely to be acquitted of those grave faults that envy or
disappointed expectations have attributed to her. Her character united
kind-heartedness with inconsideration, imprudence with austerity,
ardent feeling with great practical common-sense. Probably the
emperor understood her very little at the time of his marriage, and
that she long remained to him an enigma ma