The grandest thing of all was a State ball in Versailles;--that magnificent but mournful, almost monumental pile, being gaily decorated and illuminated--almost transformed out of its tragic traditions. What a charming picture of her hostess the Queen gives us:
"The Empress met us at the top of the staircase, looking like a fairy queen, or nymph, in a white dress, trimmed with grass and diamonds,--a beautiful _tour de corsage_ of diamonds round the top of her dress;--the same round her waist, and a corresponding _coiffure_, with her Spanish and Portuguese orders."
She must have been a lovely vision. The Emperor thought so, for (according to the Queen) forgetting that it is not "good form" for a man to admire or compliment his own wife, he exclaimed, as she appeared: "_Comme tu es belle! _" ("How beautiful you are!")
I am afraid he was not always so polite. During her first season at the Tuileries, which she called "a beautiful prison," and which is now as much a thing of the past as the Bastile, she often in her gay, impulsive way offended against the stern laws of Court etiquette, and was reproved for a lack of dignity. Once at a reception she suddenly perceived a little way down the line an old school-friend, and, hurrying forward, kissed her affectionately. It was nice for the young lady, but the Emperor frowned and said, in that cold marital tone which cuts like an east wind: "Madame, you forget that you are the Empress!"
In a letter from the Prince to his uncle Leopold I find this suggestive sentence in reference to the ball at Versailles: "Victoria made her toilette in Marie Antoinette's boudoir." It would almost seem the English Queen might have feared to see in her dressing-glass a vision of the French Queen's proud young head wearing a diadem as brilliant as her own, or perhaps that cruel crown of silver--her terror-whitened hair.
The parting was sad. The Empress "could not bring herself to face it"; so the Queen went to her room with the Emperor, who said: "Eugénie, here is the Queen." "Then," adds Her Majesty, "she came and gave me a beautiful fan and a rose and heliotrope from the garden, and Vicky a bracelet set with rubies and diamonds containing her hair, with which Vicky was delighted."