Note Footnote 97: — Chapter XXIV · (continued 3)

My dearest Uncle,—I must make many excuses for not writing to you yesterday, to thank you for your kind letter of the 30th, as on Friday and Saturday my time was entirely taken up with my Royal brother, the King of Sardinia,97 and I had to make up for loss of time these last days. He leaves us to-morrow at an extraordinary hour—four o'clock in the morning (which you did once or twice)—wishing to be at Compiègne to-morrow night, and at Turin on Tuesday. He is eine ganz besondere, abenteuerliche Erscheinung, startling in the extreme in appearance and manner when you first see him, but, just as Aumale says, il faut l'aimer quand on le connaît bien. He is so frank, open, just, straightforward, liberal and tolerant, with much sound good sense. He never breaks his word, and you may rely on him, but wild and extravagant, courting adventures and dangers, and with a very strange, short, rough manner, an exaggeration of that short manner of speaking which his poor brother had. He is shy in society, which makes him still more brusque, and he does not know (never having been out of his own country or even out in Society) what to say to the number of people who are presented to him here, and which is, I know from experience, a most odious thing. He is truly attached to the Orleans family, particularly to Aumale, and will be a friend and adviser to them. To-day he will be invested with the Order of the Garter. He is more like a Knight or King of the Middle Ages than anything one knows nowadays.