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The Princes and Princesses then walked up to the table, and after bowing to Their Majesties, signed in the order fixed by the order of ceremonies. When, finally, the Archchancellor and the Secretary had affixed their signatures, the procession, in the same order as before, reconducted Their Majesties to the Empress's apartments.
The emperor and his train alighted from their horses, the empress and ladies from their coaches, and I did not perceive they were in any fright or concern. I lay on the ground to kiss his majesty's and the empress's hand.
The Vienna volunteer battalions abandoned the work of home protection for which they had enlisted, and, with a banner embroidered by the Empress's own hand, joined the active forces.
These ladies had not apparently remembered that they would find him there; and Madame de Remusat, imagining that she already saw him leaping out of bed saber and pistol in hand, turned and ran as fast as she could, still holding the candle in her hand, and leaving the Empress in complete darkness, and did not stop to take breath until she reached the Empress's bedroom, when she remembered that the latter had been left in the corridor with no light.
The outrageous extravagance in the Empress's household was a continual vexation to him, and he had dismissed several furnishers of whose disposition to abuse Josephine's ready credulity he had ample proof.
Very funereal in her green dress was tall Madame Polge, the ideal of dry nurses; she completed the picture. But where had the Empress's secretary gone? He was standing by a cradle, which he was scrutinizing sadly, shaking his head. "Bigre de Bigre!" whispered Pompon to Madame Polge. "It's the Wallachian."
She is the Countess Waldersee, daughter of the late David Lee, a wholesale grocer of New York, and who at the time that she became the wife of Field-marshal Count Waldersee, was the widow of the present German empress's uncle, Prince Frederick of Schleswig-Holstein.
Behind them, with downcast eyes and reluctant steps, came the ladies of the court, all of one mind as to the weariness of too much godliness and too much praying. "When will the empress's private chapel be completed?" whispered one of the ladies to another. "When will this daily martyrdom cease? Is it not too bad to be forced to church five times a day?"
The Empress's thin face looked particularly small under the mass of natural and artificial adornment which towered above her brow.
So ended our game of croquet; we felt crushed and crestfallen. At the Empress's tea, to which we were bidden, we were not spared satirical gibes on the subject of our luckless game.
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