n the latter country. He, the essayist, might safely leave
Catherine de Medici out of the question. He need not go back as far. He
might begin with Marie de Medici and her daughter, Henrietta-Maria.
Sometimes the "henpecking" turns out to be for the world's benefit, as
when Sophie-Dorothea worries her spouse to let her first boy wear a
heavy christening dress and crown, which eventually kill the infant, who
makes room for Frederick the Great. But one could have very well spared
the servant-wench who henpecked Peter the Great, and Scarron's widow who
henpecked Louis XIV., and Marie-Antoinette and the rest.

The regency of '65, though perhaps not disastrous in itself, was fraught
with the most disastrous consequences for the future. It gave the
Empress the political importance which she had been coveting for years;
henceforth she made it a habit to be present at the councils of
ministers, who in their turn informed her personally of events which
ought to have remained strictly between them and the chief of the State.
This went on until M. Emile Ollivier came into power, January 2, 1870.
The Italian and Austrian ambassadors, however, continued to flatter her
vanity by constantly appealing to her; the part they played on the 4th
of September shows plainly enough how they profited in the interest of
their governments by these seemingly diplomatic indiscretions on their
own part.

As for Bismarck, as some one who was very much behind the political
scenes in Berlin once said, "His policy consisted in paying milliners'
and dressmakers' bills in Paris for ladies to whose personal adornment
and appearance he was profoundly indifferent." I am bound to say that
Lord Lyons courteously but steadfastly refused to be drawn out
"diplomatically" by the Empress. While paying due homage to the woman
and to the sovereign, he tacitly declined to consider her a pawn in the
political game, and, though always extremely guarded in his language,
could scarcely refrain from showing his contempt for those who did. I do
not know whether Lord Lyons will leave behind any "memoirs;" if he do,
we shall probably get not only nothing but the truth, but the whole
truth, with regard to the share of the Empress in determining the war;
and we shall find that that war was not decided upon between the
Imperial couple between the 14th and 15th of July, '70, but between the
5th and 6th of July. Meanwhile, without presuming to anticipate such
revelations on the p