to his credit that have been exaggerated; he is
popular.

M. de Nemours is just the contrary. At court they say: "There is
something unlucky about the Duke de Nemours."

M. de Montpensier has the good sense to love, to esteem and to honour
profoundly the Duchess d'Orleans.

The other day there was a masked and costumed ball, but only for the
family and the intimate court circle--the princesses and ladies of
honour. M. de Joinville appeared all in rags, in complete Chicard
costume. He was extravagantly gay and danced a thousand unheard-of
dances. These capers, prohibited elsewhere, rendered the Queen
thoughtful. "Wherever did he learn all this?" she asked, and added:
"What naughty dances! Fie!" Then she murmured: "How graceful he is!"

Mme. de Joinville was dressed as a bargee and affected the manner of a
street gamin. She likes to go to those places that the court detests the
most, *the theatres and concerts of the boulevards*.

The other day she greatly shocked Mme. de Hall, the wife of an admiral,
who is a Protestant and Puritan, by asking her: "Madame, have you seen
the "Closerie des Genets"?"

The Prince de Joinville had imagined a nuisance that exasperated the
Queen. He procured an old barrel organ somewhere, and would enter her
apartments playing it and singing in a hoarse, grating voice. The Queen
laughed at first. But it lasted a quarter of an hour, half an hour.
"Joinville, stop it!" He continued to grind away. "Joinville, go away!"
The prince, driven out of one door, entered by another with his organ,
his songs and his hoarseness. Finally the Queen fled to the King's
apartments.

The Duchess d'Aumale did not speak French very fluently; but as soon as
she began to speak Italian, the Italian of Naples, she thrilled like a
fish that falls back into the water, and gesticulated with Neapolitan
verve. "Put your hands in your pockets," the Duke d'Aumale would say to
her. "I shall have to have your hands tied. Why do you gesticulate like
that?"

"I didn't notice it," the princess would reply.

"That is true, she doesn't notice it," said the Prince to me one day.
"You wouldn't believe it, but my mother, who is so dignified, so cold,
so reserved when she is speaking French, begins gesticulating like
Punchinello when by chance she speaks Neapolitan."

The Duke de Montpensier salutes passers-by graciously and gaily. The
Duke d'Aumale does not salute more often than he is compelled to; at
Neuilly they say