excepting in Rotten Row or
the Bois de Boulogne, can so many celebrated and beautiful women and
handsome or famous men be seen parading up and down together as on the
Promenade des Anglais of a fine afternoon in the season. Here gathers
the _creme de la creme_ of two worlds, the Old and the New, Europe and
America. In the winter of 1870 the town was crowded to excess. Never
before were there so many notabilities assembled at Nice--never was
there so much gossip, so much _cancan_ and small talk. It was amusing to
sit in the shade of a palm tree on the promenade and review the
_personae_ of this Vanity Fair. Frederick Charles of Prussia and his
princess in a landau, with two Nubians on the box; the crown-princess
Victoria of England and her sister of Hesse-Darmstadt, on a trip from
Cannes, where they were then visiting; Her Grace of Newcastle; De
Villemessant of the _Figaro_, in an invalid's chair, the most
accomplished of _causeurs_; Count Montalivet, the former minister of
Louis Philippe, and by him, for a few days at the full of the season, a
little old gentleman with a squeaky voice, M. Adolphe Thiers. Next comes
a group of ladies, the three daughters of the Hispano-Mexican duchess De
Fernan-Nunez; all three looking exactly alike, tall and dark; all three
of a height; all three invariably dressed in black, with lofty Tyrolese
hats and cocks' feathers; all three unmarried; all three marriageable,
and worth Croesus only knows how many millions; all three invariably
alone--a fact which made old Madame Colaredo scream out of her window
one day, "_Tiens! voila les trois cent (sans) gardes_!" Then follow
Lord Rokeby, the most affable of lordships; Lord Portarlington;
General Sir William Williams of Kars; Princess Kantacuzene, the last
descendant of the imperial Byzantine house of that name; the ideally
lovely Miss Amy Shaw of Boston; the three pretty Miss Warrens of New
York; Madame Gavini de Campile, the wife of the prefect, a fine-looking
dame gloriously arrayed in showy robes, whom half the society adored and
the rest cordially hated; the duke de Mouchy, who married Anna Murat;
the duke de Perigord-Talleyrand, who married an American; the duke de la
Conquista, who derives his title from the conquest of Peru; the lovely
countess Del Borgo; and the famous Italian beauty, Madame Bellotti, a
Milanese lady, whose maiden name was Visconti, of that semi-royal house.
Theresa Bellotti's beauty is of a grand style seen nowhere out o