The monarch was much criticized for his intrigue with Mme. Musard, whose husband gave popular concerts during the brightest days of the Second Empire on the site of what is now the “Jardin de Paris.” Mme. Musard was as well known by the boulevardiers and flâneurs as the Empress herself, and more talked about, while the complacent husband was accorded the customary amount of chaff. When congratulated on the improvement in his finances, Musard, with self-satisfied air, replied that it had pleased Providence to remove from this sublunary sphere a wealthy relative, who had left him a nice little sum. Unfortunately, Musard had quite forgotten to keep up his pleasant deception by putting a mourning band on his hat, so that the explanation of his good fortune was received with a general wink. But presently the pony-chaise which Musard had started shortly after his wife’s acquaintance with the King of Holland gave place to a phaeton and a pair of horses, worth 800 guineas, while madame’s magnificent turn-out made the great ladies green with envy. The former head-groom of a milord anglais had charge of the stables; everything was done in perfect style. There was a house in town and a château, whose grounds and flower-gardens ran down to the Seine.
To find a parallel to so much magnificence one had to recall the days of Louis Quatorze and Mme. de Montespan, of Louis Quinze and the Du Barry. Paris society was greatly intriguée to know the precise locality of the Pactolus from whence so much gold flowed, but it remained in blissful ignorance for many a month. While his legitimate spouse was vegetating in watery Holland, this King who dragged his ermine robes through the mire with such complete indifference to what the Mrs. Grundys of Paris and The Hague might say was receiving the lady at a charming cottage in a secluded spot, suggestive of Rosamund’s bower. The excellent chef d’orchestre used to accompany his wife to the frontier, give her a marital embrace, and then return to his beloved Paris pour s’amuser. Not the least curious and instructive part of the story is the fact that the subjects of this monarch who took for his model no less a god than Eros looked on with amused complacence, and only the Queen suffered. There was another lady whom William of Holland held in the highest admiration--Mlle. Abingdon, “of the Paris theatres”; she, however, did not appreciate His Majesty to the extent that she might have done, and one day, when the King wanted her to read to him by the hour, she said she would “call her mother, who was a much better reader than herself.” Mme. Musard died at the age of forty, blind and insane; but the roi galant lived to marry a charming young wife, the sister of H.R.H. the Duchess of Albany.