At dinner General Canrobert, who was fresh from the Crimea, was placed next to her Majesty, and gave her his war experiences.  Next day the royal party went to the Exposition Universelle, then going on in Paris, and afterwards, while the queen was receiving the ambassadors, the emperor drove the Prince of Wales through the streets of Paris; he afterwards took his older guests sight-seeing in his capital.  “As we crossed the Pont de Change,” writes the queen, “the emperor said, pointing to the Conciergerie, ’That is where I was in prison.”  He alluded to the time when he was brought from Strasburg to Paris, before being shipped for Rio Janeiro.  “Strange,” continues the queen, “to be driving with us as emperor through the streets of Paris in triumph!”

They visited Versailles (where the queen sketched), and afterwards went to the Grand Opera.  They saw Paris illuminated that night as they drove back to Saint-Cloud, the emperor and Prince Albert recalling old German songs; and the queen says:  “The emperor seems very fond of his old recollections of Germany.  There is much that is German, and very little—­nothing, in fact—­markedly French in his character.”

One day all the royal party went out in a hack carriage, with what the queen calls “common bonnets and veils,” and drove incognito round Paris.  Sometimes they talked politics, sometimes they seem to have joked and laughed with childish glee and enjoyment; and one night the emperor took the queen by torchlight to see the tomb of his great uncle at the Invalides.  A guard of old warriors who had served under Napoleon, with Santini, his valet at St. Helena, at their head, escorted the queen of England to the chapel where stood Napoleon’s coffin, not yet entombed, with the sword of Austerlitz lying upon it.  The band in the chapel was playing “God Save the Queen,” while without raged a sudden thunder-storm.

The mornings were devoted to quiet pleasures and sight-seeing, the evenings to operas, state dinners, and state balls.  The great ball given on this occasion in the galleries of Versailles was talked of in Paris for years after.  “The empress,” says the queen, “met us at the top of the staircase, looking like a fairy-queen or nymph, in a white dress trimmed with bunches of grass and diamonds, a beautiful tour de corsage of diamonds round the top of her dress, and all en riviere; the same round her waist, and a corresponding headdress, and her Spanish and Portuguese orders.  The emperor said when she appeared:  ‘Comme tu es belle!’”

Next day, as the emperor drove the queen in an open carriage, they talked of the Orleans family, whose feelings had been greatly hurt by a recent sequestration of their property.  The emperor tried to make excuses for this act,—­excuses that seemed to the queen but tame,—­and then he drove to the chapel built over the house where the Duke of Orleans had died on the Avenue de Neuilly.  The emperor bought her two of the medals sold on the spot, one of which bore the likeness of the Comte de Paris, with an inscription calling him the hope of France.