The ball commenced.  There was present a great Scotch lord, the Marquis of Huntley, who belonged to a very illustrious Jacobite house.  In his youth he had been what was then called a beau danseur, and had had the honor of opening a fancy dress ball at the Chateau of Versailles with the Queen Marie Antoinette.  Charles X. remembered it and wished that the Marquis, then nearly eighty, should open the ball with little Mademoiselle, who was but nine.  Still a beau danseur, the old Englishman had not forgotten the pirouettes of Versailles; all the court admired, and the young princes were greatly amused.

The ball was a marvellous success.  It was a revival of the beautiful fetes of the Renaissance.  The sixteenth century, so elegant, so picturesque, lived anew.  A painter, who was then but twenty-nine, and who had already a great vogue, M. Eugene Lamy, perpetuated its memory in a series of twenty-six watercolors, which have been lithographed, and form a curious album. (A copy of this album is in the National Library, in the Cabinet of Engravings.) It contains, besides, four water-colors, representing one, the ascent of the stairway of the Pavilion de Marsan by the guests; another, Mary Stuart seated on the throne; a third, one of the dances of the ball; a fourth, the entrance of the Dowager Queen of Scotland twenty-two reproductions of the principal personages at the fete.  At the left are the arms of the historic personages represented, and at the right those of the representative.  Then above the portrait of the Duchess of Berry there are at the left the arms of Scotland and France, and at the right those of France and the Two Sicilies, and above the portrait of the Duke of Chartres at the left the arms of France, at the right the ducal blazon of Orleans.

Here are the names of the twenty-two persons who figure in the album of M. Eugene Lamy, with the personages represented:—­

1.  The Duchess of Berry (Mary Stuart).

2.  The Duke of Chartres (Francis II.).

3.  The Duke de Nemours (a king’s page).

4.  Lady Stuart de Rothsay (Marie de Lorraine).  Daughter of Lord Hardwicke, she was the wife of Lord Stuart de Rothsay, ambassador of England at Paris.

5.  The Marquis of Douglas, since Duke of Hamilton (the Duke de Chatellerault), a finished type of the great Scotch lord; he married in 1843 the Princess Mary of Baden, and under the reign of Napoleon III. added to his titles of Hamilton and of Brandon in Scotland and England, the title of Duke de Chatellerault, in France, which had formerly belonged to the Hamilton family.

6.  The Marchioness of Podenas, nee Nadaillac (Catharine de’ Medici).  Lady companion of the Duchess of Berry, she was one of the brightest women of the court.

7.  The Count de Pastoret, married to a de Neufermeil (Duke of Ferrara).

8.  The Marquis de Vogue (the Vidame de Chartres).  Married to a Mademoiselle de Machault d’Arnouville; his son was the diplomat who was ambassador under the presidency of Thiers and of Marshal Macmahon.