hands of Eugenie. Had she withdrawn to Tours or to
Bourges, summoned the Assembly to meet there, and called around her
the partisans of the Empire, she might have saved the heritage of her
son. But her essentially feminine and frivolous nature was not fitted
for deeds of high resolve or for heroic determinations. A morbid dread
of following in the footsteps of Marie Antoinette had pursued her in
the later years of her prosperity. She knew that she was unpopular,
and visions of the fate of the Austrian queen or of the still more
horrible one of the Princesse de Lamballe must have risen before her
as the shouts of the Parisian mob, exulting in the downfall of
her husband, met her ear. In that hour of disaster and of woe no
Frenchman, for all the boasted chivalry of the race, was at hand
to aid or protect the fair lady who had so long queened it at the
Tuileries. The Austrian ambassador, the Italian minister, the Corsican
Pietrio planned and managed her escape from the palace. She took
refuge in the house of an American, her dentist, Dr. Thomas W.
Evans. He it was who got her out of Paris and accompanied her to the
seacoast, placing his own carriage at her disposal. She crossed the
Channel in the yacht of an English gentleman. Thus guarded by aliens,
she passed from the land of her queenship to that of exile.

To-day, in her abode at Chiselhurst, the widow of Napoleon III.
attracts scarcely less of the world's interest and attention than
she did as throned empress and queen of Fashion. Unfortunately, the
supreme tact that once was her distinguishing quality seems to have
deserted her in the days of her decadence. She, the most graceful of
women, has not learned the art of growing old gracefully. She had
played the part of a beauty and the leader of fashion for years. Now
that she is past fifty that character is no longer possible to her.
But she might have assumed another--less showy, perhaps, but surely
far more touching. With her whitening hairs she might have worthily
worn the triple dignity of her widowhood, her maternity and her
misfortune. She has chosen instead, with a weakness unworthy of the
part that she has played on the wide stage of contemporary history, to
clutch vainly after the fleeting shadow of her vanished charms. A head
loaded with false yellow hair, a face covered with paint and powder, a
mincing gait and the airs and graces of an antiquated coquette,--such
to-day is she who was once the world's wonder