nterview on the subject that it was
hardly worth while to have made a _coup d'etat_ to end it in such a
manner. M. de Morny argued and reasoned with his imperial brother, but
neither the violence of Persigny nor the arguments of De Morny made
any impression on the cold and inflexible will of Napoleon III., and
a few days later the countess made her appearance at one of the
court-balls in a dress looped and wreathed with the imperial
emblem-flower, the violet. The emperor, advancing toward her,
presented her with a superb bouquet of the same significant blossoms.
The meaning of that little scene was fully understood by the
spectators. The marriage was irrevocably decided upon, and all that
they had to do was to submit to the imperial will and make ready to
offer their homage to the new empress. With the solitary exception of
Prince Napoleon, the imperial family submitted with a good grace to
the matrimonial projects of their chief. The Princess Mathilde in
particular, although the marriage would depose her from the place
that she then occupied as the first lady of the court, declared her
willingness to bear the train of the new empress in public if such a
duty should be required of her, as it had been of the sisters of the
First Napoleon.

There remained, however, an arrangement to be completed which, though
awkward and painful, was yet positively necessary. No one better than
Napoleon III. was aware of the truth of the old adage which declares
that a man must be off with the old love before he is on with the new.
In an hotel on the Rue du Cirque dwelt a lady who had been the partner
of his days of exile and ill-fortune, who had impoverished herself in
his service, and who had devoted herself to furthering his aims with a
persistency worthy of a better cause. This lady, the well-known Mrs.
Howard, was now to be got rid of. A frank and open rupture was not in
the style or the ideas of her royal and sphinx-like lover. A pretended
secret mission to England lured her from Paris. She learned the truth
at Boulogne, and hastened back to her home. There she found that her
hotel had been visited by the police, and that a cabinet wherein she
kept the letters of Louis Napoleon had been broken open and rifled of
its contents. Deeply wounded by the treatment she had received, she
withdrew, not without dignity, from all attempt at contesting the
position with her rival. "I go," she wrote to Napoleon, "a second
Josephine, bearing with