Note 67 — Chapter XV

Thus wrote the Duchesse du Maine[67] to her brother, of whom she was perhaps a little more fond than even their blood-relationship warranted. This privilege of stealing the horse, while the meaner-born might not even look over the hedge, was claimed by the sons and the daughters of the old noblesse, who condescended to grace the court of Napoléon III., with a cynicism worthy of the most libertine traditions of the ancien régime; and neither the Empress nor the Emperor did anything to discountenance the claim. The former, provided that "tout se passait en famille," closed her eyes to many things she ought not to have tolerated. At the Tuileries, a certain measure of decorum was preferred; at Compiègne and Fontainebleau, where the house was "packed" as it were, the most flagrant eccentricities, to call them by no harsher name, were not only permitted, but tacitly encouraged by the Empress. This was especially the case when the first series of guests was gone. It generally included the most serious portion of the visitors, "les ennuyeurs, les empêcheurs de danser en rond,"[68] as they were called. The ladies belonging to, or classed in that category, presented, no doubt, a striking contrast to those of the succeeding series, in which the English element was not always conspicuous by its absence. The costumes of the latter were something wonderful to behold. The cloth skirt, which had then been recently introduced from England, and the cloth dress, draped elegantly over it, enabled their wearers to defy all kinds of weather. And as they went tramping down the muddy roads, their coquettish little hats daintily poised on enormous chignons, their walking boots displaying more than the regulation part of ankle, the less sophisticated Compiègnois stared with all their might at the strange company from the Château, and no wonder. Still, the surprise of the inhabitants was small compared to that of the troopers of the garrison at the invasion of their riding-school by such a contingent, which indulged in ring-tilting, not unfrequently in tent-pegging, and, more frequently still, "in taking a header into space," to the great amusement of their companions.