d where his only role is to be a cloak for the amours of his
wife. At last, however, on the third occasion when I visited the palace,
I found this sovereign in the exercise of his inglorious function, with
the wife on one hand, and the lover on the other. He is not ill-looking;
he has hair of a ruddy gold, which naturally curls, and his eyes are
dark, a combination which I always regard as the mark of some congenital
deficiency, physical or moral; his features are irregular, but pleasing;
the nose perhaps a little short, and the mouth a little womanish; his
address is excellent, and he can express himself with point. But to
pierce below these externals is to come on a vacuity of any sterling
quality, a deliquescence of the moral nature, a frivolity and
inconsequence of purpose that mark the nearly perfect fruit of a decadent
age. He has a worthless smattering of many subjects, but a grasp of
none. 'I soon weary of a pursuit,' he said to me, laughing; it would
almost appear as if he took a pride in his incapacity and lack of moral
courage. The results of his dilettanteism are to be seen in every field;
he is a bad fencer, a second-rate horseman, dancer, shot; he sings--I
have heard him--and he sings like a child; he writes intolerable verses
in more than doubtful French; he acts like the common amateur; and in
short there is no end to the number of the things that he does, and does
badly. His one manly taste is for the chase. In sum, he is but a plexus
of weaknesses; the singing chambermaid of the stage, tricked out in man's
apparel, and mounted on a circus horse. I have seen this poor phantom of
a prince riding out alone or with a few huntsmen, disregarded by all, and
I have been even grieved for the bearer of so futile and melancholy an
existence. The last Merovingians may have looked not otherwise.

The Princess Amalia Seraphina, a daughter of the Grand-Ducal house of
Toggenburg-Tannhauser, would be equally inconsiderable if she were not a
cutting instrument in the hands of an ambitious man. She is much younger
than the Prince, a girl of two-and-twenty, sick with vanity,
superficially clever, and fundamentally a fool. She has a red-brown
rolling eye, too large for her face, and with sparks of both levity and
ferocity; her forehead is high and narrow, her figure thin and a little
stooping. Her manners, her conversation, which she interlards with
French, her very tastes and ambitions, are alike assumed; and t