Stray Pearls: Memoirs of Margaret De Ribaumont, Viscountess of Bellaise, Yonge [love books to read txt] 📗

the effect of the handi-work. However, Nan disliked the notion very much, and showed it so plainly in her face that the Queen exclaimed: ‘You are no courtier, Mademoiselle de Ribaumont. Why did you not marry her to her Roundhead cousin, and leave her in England, Madame? Come, my god-daughter, you at least have learnt the art of commanding your looks.’

Poor Annora must have had a sad time of it with my mother when we were gone. She was a good girl, but she had grown up in rough times, and had a proud independent nature that chafed and checked at trifles, and could not brood being treated like a hairdresser’s block, even by Queens or Princesses. She was likewise very young, and she would have been angered instead of amused at the scene which followed, which makes me laugh whenever I think of it.

The Queen sent messages to know whether the Prince of Wales were ready, and presently he came down in a black velvet suits slashed with white and carnation ribbons, and a little enameled jewel on his gold chain, representing a goose of these three colours. His mother turned him all round, smoothed his hair, fresh buckled his plume, and admonished him with earnest entreaties to do himself credit.

‘I will, Madame,’ he said. ‘I will do my very utmost to be worthy of my badge.’

‘Now, Charles, if you play the fool and lose her, I will never forgive you.’

I understood it soon. The Queen was bent on winning for her son the hand of Mademoiselle, a granddaughter of France, and the greatest heiress there. If all were indeed lost in England, he would thus be far from a landless Prince, and her wealth might become a great assistance to the royal cause in England. But Mademoiselle was several years older than the Prince, and was besides stiff, haughty, conceited, and not much to his taste, so he answered rather sullenly that he could not speak French.

‘So much the better,’ said his mother; ‘you would only be uttering follies. When I am not there, Rupert must speak for you.’

‘Rupert is too High-Dutch to be much of a courtier,’ said the Prince.

‘Rupert is old enough to know what is for your good, and not sacrifice all to a jest,’ returned his mother.

By this time the carriage had reached the Palais Royal. We were told that Mademoiselle was still at her toilette, and up we all went, through ranks of Swiss and lackeys, to her apartments, to a splendid dressing-room, where the Princess sat in a carnation dress, richly ornamented with black and white, all complete except the fastening the feather in her hair. The friseur was engaged in this critical operation, and whole ranks of ladies stood round, one of them reading aloud one of Plutarch’s Lives. The Queen came forward, with the most perfect grace, crying: ‘Oh, it is ravishing! What a coincidence!’ and pointing to her son, as if the similarity in colours had been a mere chance instead of a contrivance of hers.

Then, with the most gracious deference in the world, so as not to hurt the hairdresser’s feelings, she showed my head, and begged permission to touch up her niece’s, kissing her as she did so. Then she signed to the Prince to hold her little hand-mirror, and he obeyed, kneeling on one knee before Mademoiselle; while the Queen, with hands that really were more dexterous than those of any one I ever saw, excepting my mother, dealt with her niece’s hair, paying compliments in her son’s name all the time, and keeping him in check with her eye. She contrived to work in some of her own jewels, rubies and diamonds, to match the scarlet, black and white. I have since found the scene mentioned in Mademoiselle’s own memoirs, but she did not see a quarter of the humour of it. She was serene in the certainty that her aunt was paying court to her, and the assurance that her cousin was doing the same, though she explains that, having hopes of the Emperor, and thinking the Prince a mere landless exile, she only pitied him. Little did she guess how he laughed at her, his mother, and himself, most of all at her airs, while his mother, scolding him all the time, joined in the laugh, though she always maintained that Mademoiselle, in spite of her overweening conceit and vanity, would become an excellent and faithful wife, and make her husband’s interests her own.

‘Rather too much so,’ said the Prince, shrugging his shoulders; ‘we know what the Margaret of Anjou style of wife can do for a King of England.’

However, as he always did what any one teased him about, if it were not too unpleasant, and as he was passionately fond of his mother, and as amused by playing on the vanity of la grande Mademoiselle, he acted his part capitally. It was all in dumb show, for he really could not speak French at that time, though he could understand what was said to him. He, like a good many other Englishmen, held that the less they assimilated themselves to their French hosts, the more they showed their hopes of returning home, and it was not till after his expedition to Scotland that he set himself to learn the language.

Queen Henrietta’s skill in the toilette was noted. She laughingly said that if everything else failed her she should go into business as a hairdresser, and she had hardly completed her work, before a message was brought from Queen Anne to desire to see Mademoiselle in her full dress.

I do not know what would have become of me, if my good-natured royal godmother, who never forgot anybody, had not packed me into a carriage with some of the ladies who were accompanying Mademoiselle. That lady had a suit of her own, and went about quite independently of her father and her stepmother, who, though a Princess of Lorraine, was greatly contemned and slighted by the proud heiress.

I was put au courant with all this by the chatter of the ladies in the coach. I did no know them, and in the dark they hardly knew who was there. Men with flambeaux ran by the side of the carriage, and now and then the glare fell across a smiling face, glanced on a satin dress, or gleamed back from some jewels; and then we had a long halt in the court of the Tuileries, while Mademoiselle went to the Queen-Regent to be inspected. We waited a long time, and I heard a great deal of gossip before we were again set in motion, and when once off we soon found ourselves in the court of the Hotel de Choisy, where we mounted the stairs in the rear of Mademoiselle, pausing on the way through the anteroom, in order to give a final adjustment to her head-dress before a large mirror, the Prince of Wales standing obediently beside her, waiting to hand her into the room, so that the two black, white, and carnation figures were reflected side by side, which was, I verily believe, the true reason of her stopping there, for Queen Henrietta’s handiwork was too skilful to require retouching. Prince Rupert was close by, to act as interpreter, his tall, powerful figure towering above them both, and his dark eyes looking as if his thoughts were far off, yet keeping in control the young Prince’s great inclination to grimace and otherwise make game of Mademoiselle’s magnificent affectations and condescensions.

I was rather at a loss, for the grand salon was one sea of feathers, bright satins and velvets, and curled heads, and though I tried to come in with Mademoiselle’s suite I did not properly belong to it, and my own party were entirely lost to me. I knew hardly any one, and was quite