Note 289 — BOOK V I MARIE LOUISE OF ORLEANS

The lively Mme. D’Aulnoy gives a description of a scene previous to the departure of the young Queen’s household from Madrid. The ladies had been privately mustered in the Retiro Gardens for the King to see how they would look mounted when they entered the capital in state with the Queen. ‘The young ladies of the palace were quite pretty, but, good God! what figures the Duchess of Terranova and Doña Maria de Aragon cut. They were both mounted on mules, all bristling and clanking with silver, and with a great saddle cloth of black velvet, like those used by physicians on their horses in Paris. They were both dressed in widows’ weeds, which I have already described to you, both very ugly and very old, with an air of severity and imperiousness, and they wore great hats tied on by strings under their chins. There were twenty gentlemen around them holding them up, for fear they should fall, though they would never have allowed one to touch them thus unless they had been in fear of breaking their necks.—‘Voyage d’Espagne.’ The same authority says that the Duchess of Terranova alone took with her on the journey, ‘six litters of different coloured embroidered velvet, and forty mules caparisoned as richly as ever I have seen.’