arriage, they
talked of the Orleans family, whose feelings had been greatly hurt
by a recent sequestration of their property. The emperor tried
to make excuses for this act,--excuses that seemed to the queen
but tame,--and then he drove to the chapel built over the house
where the Duke of Orleans had died on the Avenue de Neuilly. The
emperor bought her two of the medals sold on the spot, one of which
bore the likeness of the Comte de Paris, with an inscription calling
him the hope of France.

The visit ended after eight delightful days, and the emperor escorted
his guests back to Boulogne.

Prince Albert, the queen confesses, was not so much carried away
by the fascinations of their new friend as herself; but the empress
secured his entire commendation.

The queen and the emperor continued to correspond, and subsequently
met several times, at Osborne House or at Cherbourg.

I have told at some length of this visit, because it seemed to
me to mark the culminating point of Napoleon III.'s successful
career; not only was he fully admitted into the inner circle of
European sovereigns, but his place there was confirmed by the personal
friendship and alliance of the greatest among them.

In 1867 there was another Universal Exposition held in Paris; and
this was also a time of great outward glory and triumph for the
emperor, surrounded as he was by European emperors, crown princes,
and kings; but Queen Victoria was then a sorrowing widow, and decay
was threatening Napoleon's apparent prosperity.

It was in 1867 that the emperor and empress received the czar,
the sultan, the Crown Prince of Prussia, Princess Alice of Hesse
Darmstadt, and many other crowned heads and celebrities. It was
a year of fetes and international courtesies. But in Paris itself
there was a strange feeling of insecurity,--a fearful looking for
something, society knew not what. "It seemed," said one who breathed
the rarefied air in which lived the upper circles of society, "as
if the air were charged with electricity; as if the shadows of
coming events were being darkly cast over the joyous city."

One of the most remarkable sights of that gay time of hollowness
and brilliancy was the review given in honor of the Emperor of
Russia, on June 6. No less than sixty thousand French troops, of
all arms of the service, filed past the three grand-stands on the
race-course of the Bois de Boulogne. On the central stand sat the
Empress Eugenie, with the Pri