"Let me make the ballads of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws," said the great statesman; and in something of the same spirit his Majesty of Belgium may have said, "Let me make the royal marriages of Europe, and any one who pleases may choose the ministry."
_Apropos_ of the Roi Leopold, is it not difficult to understand a Princess Charlotte falling in love with his good looks? There is no disputing on this point. The most eminently successful man I ever knew in ladies' society was Jack Beauclerc--"Caucasian Jack" we used to call him at Brookes's. Everybody knows Jack was no beauty. Heavy beetling brows, a dark, saturnine, ill-omened expression, was ever on his features. Nor did his face light up at times, as one occasionally sees with such men; he was always the same sail misanthropic-looking fellow. Neither could one call him agreeable--at least I, meeting him very often, never found him so. But he was of a determined, resolute nature; one of those men that appear never to turn from any object on which they have set a strong will. This may have gone very far with ladies, who very often conceive a kind of esteem for whatever they fear. He said himself that his secret was, "always using them ill;" and certainly, if facts could bear out such a theory, one might believe him. Probably no man ever cultivated these tastes with such assiduity--these, I say, for play and duelling were also passions with him.
He was _attaché_ to our mission at Naples before he was sixteen, and had the honour of wounding the old Marquis d'Espagna with the small sword at the same precocious era. The duel originated after a truly Italian manner; and as there are at Naples many incorrect reports of it, I will take the trouble to give the real one. The Marquis was an old man, married to one of the most beautiful women in Italy. She was a Venetian, and if my memory serves me right, a Guillardini by birth. She married him at eighteen to escape a convent, he being the richest noble under the rank of the blood royal at Naples. Very unlike the majority of Italian husbands, the Marquis was excessively jealous, would not permit the most innocent freedoms of his young and lovely wife, and eventually secluded himself and--worse still--her from all society, and never appeared except at a court ball, or some such festivity that there were no means of avoiding. It was at one of these festivities that the King, who liked to see his ball-room put forth its fairest aspect, bantered the Marquis on the rumour that had even reached the ears of royalty, as to his inordinate jealousy. The Marquis, whose old spirit of courtiership predominated even as strongly as his jealousy, assured his Majesty that the worthy people of Naples did him great injustice, and that, although conscious of the Marquesa's great beauty and attractiveness, he had yet too high a sense of the distinguished place he and his family had always held in the esteem of his sovereign to feel jealous of any man's pretension; adding, "If I have not admitted the conventional addition of a _cavalière servente_ to my household, I would beg your Majesty to believe it is simply because I have seen no one as yet worthy to hand la Mar-quesa to her carriage or fold her shawl."