The visit ended after eight delightful days, and the emperor escorted his guests back to Boulogne.

Prince Albert, the queen confesses, was not so much carried away by the fascinations of their new friend as herself; but the empress secured his entire commendation.

The queen and the emperor continued to correspond, and subsequently met several times, at Osborne House or at Cherbourg.

I have told at some length of this visit, because it seemed to me to mark the culminating point of Napoleon III.’s successful career; not only was he fully admitted into the inner circle of European sovereigns, but his place there was confirmed by the personal friendship and alliance of the greatest among them.

In 1867 there was another Universal Exposition held in Paris; and this was also a time of great outward glory and triumph for the emperor, surrounded as he was by European emperors, crown princes, and kings; but Queen Victoria was then a sorrowing widow, and decay was threatening Napoleon’s apparent prosperity.

It was in 1867 that the emperor and empress received the czar, the sultan, the Crown Prince of Prussia, Princess Alice of Hesse Darmstadt, and many other crowned heads and celebrities.  It was a year of fetes and international courtesies.  But in Paris itself there was a strange feeling of insecurity,—­a fearful looking for something, society knew not what.  “It seemed,” said one who breathed the rarefied air in which lived the upper circles of society, “as if the air were charged with electricity; as if the shadows of coming events were being darkly cast over the joyous city.”

One of the most remarkable sights of that gay time of hollowness and brilliancy was the review given in honor of the Emperor of Russia, on June 6.  No less than sixty thousand French troops, of all arms of the service, filed past the three grand-stands on the race-course of the Bois de Boulogne.  On the central stand sat the Empress Eugenie, with the Prince Imperial, the Crown Princess of Prussia, her sister, Princess Alice, and the Grand Duchess of Leuchtenberg.  Before this stand, on horseback on one side, sat the Grand Duke Vladimir, the Czarevitch (the present Czar of Russia), the Crown Prince of Prussia (since the lamented Emperor Frederick), Prince Gortschakoff (the Russian prime minister), Count Bismarck, and an English nobleman; on the other side were the Duc de Leuchtenberg, the Duke of Mecklenburg, and the Prince of Hesse Darmstadt; while in the centre of them all rode the czar, with Napoleon III. on one hand, and on the other the king of prussia.[1]

[Footnote 1:  Blackwood’s Magazine.]

How little could any of those who looked upon that throng of royal personages imagine what in little more than two years was coming on them all!