So I was put into a National Guard’s uniform, with a knapsack stuffed with hay on my back (in the ardour of that moment the chic companies all wore knapsacks), and was sent to drill with my company on the Rue de Londres drill ground, where the Quartier de l’Europe now stands.  A more ridiculous proceeding cannot be imagined, but old Dupaty was perfectly enchanted.  He was still more delighted when he succeeded in getting one of his works, a comic opera called Picaros et Diego given at the theatre in the Chateau of Compiegne, in honour of the marriage of my sister Louise and the King of the Belgians.  But lo! at the climax of the piece, the principal performer came forward, before the newly married couple, the Royalties, and all the great personages forming the audience, and burst forth with a gag couplet, which nobody expected.

Oui, c’en est fait, je me marie, Je veux vivre comme un Caton.  Il fut en temps pour la folie Il en est un pour la raison! [Footnote:  Rough translation:—­ Yes! all is o’er, I’m going to wed, Like Cato I’m resolved to live.  The time for youthful folly’s sped, My life to Reason now I’ll give!]

As King Leopold was not reckoned to have led a life quite devoid of love affairs, the appropriateness of the remark had a wonderful effect.  All the grandees hung their heads in a row, and the rest of the audience struggled with a violent desire to burst out laughing.

But this long digression has carried me far away.  I must get back to England and my little flotilla’s stay there.  My brother Aumale, who had accompanied me on my cruise, went with me to Windsor, where we paid our respects to Queen Victoria.  Although in the course of my various voyages I had touched at several English ports, this was the first time I really saw England, hospitable England, and the first impression it made on me was very deep.  Though the gray and smoky tint of both sky and water and buildings, and everything I passed as I went up the Thames to London Bridge, looked singularly dreary to my eyes, the immense commercial stir and general activity I saw exceeded anything I had ever expected to behold.  And the ineffaceable impression of this greatness and power was quickly succeeded by another, no less profound, and which my long life has only confirmed, that here was a nation which had known how to pass through a revolution without permitting it to encroach on its social discipline, nor allowing democratic jealousies to destroy its traditions and sow discord between the different classes of its population.

I thought Windsor quite superb.  The old castle, surrounded by its ancient trees, with its foundations lapped by the waters of the Thames, the national river, and seeming to stretch out its protecting arm over Eton and the picturesque college—­whither the flower of the nation comes to receive the healthiest and soundest of educations at the hands of a purely clerical body—­is a true symbol of the calm strength and steady permanence of the English Monarchy.