feated, she will endeavour to destroy the rising unity of Italy. She
little knows that Victor-Emanuel will not wait until then, and that, at
the first success of the French on the Rhine, he will cross the Alps at
a sign of Prussia; that at the first success of Prussia, the Italian
troops will start on their march to Rome. Nay, I repeat, it is the
Empress who will prove the ruin of France."

That playful cry of the Empress, which she was so fond of uttering in
the beginning of her married life, "As for myself, I am a Legitimist,"
without understanding, or endeavouring to understand its import, had
gradually grafted itself on her mind, although it had ceased to be on
her lips. Impatient of contradiction, self-willed and tyrannical, both
by nature and training, her sudden and marvellous elevation to one of
the proudest positions in Europe could not fail to strengthen those
defects of character. Superstitious, like most Spaniards, she was firmly
convinced that the gipsy who foretold her future greatness was a Divine
messenger, and from that to the conviction that she occupied the throne
by a right as Divine as that claimed by the Bourbons there was but one
short step. A corollary to Divine right meant, to her, personal and
irresponsible government. That was her idea of legitimism. Though by no
means endowed with high intellectual gifts, she perceived well enough,
in the beginning, that the Second Empire was not a very stable edifice,
either with regard to its foundations or superstructure, and, until
England propped it up by an alliance, and a State visit from our
sovereign, she kept commendably coy. But from that moment she aspired to
be something more than the arbiter of fashion. As I have already said,
she failed in prevailing upon the Emperor to go to the Crimea. In '59
she was more successful, in '65 she was more successful still. In the
former year, she laid the foundation of what was called the Empress's
party; in the latter, the scaffolding was removed from the structure,
henceforth the work was done inside. She, no more than her surroundings,
had the remotest idea that France was gradually undergoing a political
change, that she was recovering her constitutional rights. Her party was
like the hare in the fable that used the wrong end of the opera-glass,
and lived in a fool's paradise with regard to the distance that divided
them from the sportsman, until he was fairly upon them, in the shape of
the liberal ministry