She called for a looking-glass, and made one of her women touch up her dress and bring her a fan, asking whether I had ever been presented.  No, my first stay in Paris had been too short; besides, my rank did not make it needful, as my husband was only Viscount by favour of his uncle, who let him hold the estate.

‘Then,’ said the Prince, ‘you little know what court is!’

‘Can you make a curtsey?’ asked the Queen anxiously.

I repeated the one I had lately made to her Majesty, and they all cried out: 

‘Oh, oh! that was all very well at home.’

‘Or here before I married,’ added Queen Henrietta.  ’Since Spanish etiquette has come in, we have all been on our good behaviour.’

‘Having come from a barbarous isle,’ added the Prince.

The Queen therewith made the reverence which you all know, my grand-daughters, but which seemed to me unnatural, and the Prince’s face twinkled at the incredulity he saw in mine; but at the moment a private door was opening to give admission to a figure, not in itself very tall, but looking twice its height from its upright, haughty bearing.  There was the Bourbon face fully marked, with a good deal of fair hair in curls round it, and a wonderful air of complete self-complacency.

This was la grande Mademoiselle, daughter of Gaston Duke of Orleans, and heiress through her mother of the great old Montpensier family, who lived at the Palais Royal with her father, but was often at the Louvre.  She stood aghast, as well she might, thinking how little dignity her aunt, the Queen of England, had to be acting as mistress of deportment to a little homely widow.  The Prince turned at once.

‘There is my cousin,’ said he, ’standing amazed to see how we have caught a barbarous islander of our own, and are trying to train her to civilization.  Here—­let her represent the Queen-Regent.  Now, Meg—­Madame de Bellaise, I mean—­imitate me while my mother presents me,’ he ran on in English, making such a grotesque reverence that nobody except Mademoiselle could help laughing, and his mother made a feint of laying her fan about his ears, while she pronounced him a madcap and begged her niece to excuse him.

’For profaning the outskirts of the majesty of the Most Christian King,’ muttered the Prince, while his mother explained the matter to her niece, adding that her son could not help availing himself of the opportunity of paying her his homage.

Mademoiselle was pacified, and was graciously pleased to permit me to be presented to her, also to criticize the curtsey which I had now to perform, my good Queen being so kind in training me that I almost lost the sense of the incongruity of such a lesson at my age and in my weeds.  In fact, with my mother and my godmother commanding me, and Eustace and the Prince of Wales looking on, it was like a return to one’s childhood.  At last I satisfied my royal instructress, and as she agreed with my mother that my mourning befitted the occasion off we set en grande tenue to cross the court to the Tuileries in a little procession, the Queen, attended by my mother and Lady Morton as her ladies, and by Lord Jermyn and Eustace as her gentlemen-in-waiting.