The letters give many glimpses of the ambitious Queen Hortense, now wandering over the Swiss pastures in search of a four-leaved clover—which was to be the eign of a speedy return to Frince—now consulting a black somnambulist, now lamenting that her son was too docile and doing her best to put notions of military glory into his head, and finally dismissing his faithful tutor at three weeks' notice in a foreign country. We read of the ex-King Louis paying his son's former tutor, Vieillard, the magnificent salary of £5 a month and making up the balance in com-piiments, and bageling with an unfortunate schoolmaster who had given up his pupils for the honour of copying and classfying his Majesty's papers. After offering 70 crowns in vain, the King sent an emissary with 100 crowns and an intima: tion that he was hard up, whereupon, hi creditor writes, "I gave my receipt. for 100 crowns in' payment for ten months work and prayed that Heaven might have his Majesty in its holy keeping.
Cardi: al Mezzofanti.
Another remarkable character encountered by Lo Bas was Cardinal Mezzofanthe famous linguist, who was said to have forty-two languages at his command. "He did the honours,' writes Lo Bas, "when we visited the library (at Bologna). The Duchess (Queen Hortense was known as the Duchesse de Saint-Lieu) spoke to him in French and the members of her suite in English, German, Portuguese, Greek and Latin; and he replied in all with correctness and purity. I am told that he was once dining with an Austrian general during the last war and carried on conversation with German, Hungarian, Croatian, Bohemian, Dalmatian, Polish and Russian officers in their own tongues and yet he has never been out of Bologna. But I fear that. memory has absorbed all the other faculties of this remarkable man and that although he knows so many languages all the benefit he derives from them is that of being able to speak them. No one could be hetter qualified, one would think, to give us learned disquisitions on the origin and history of languages and their relation to one another, but he has written nothing. I afterwards heard him deliver a very poor speech."
After being turned adrift Hortense, Lo Bas became a professor and rose to high rank. A strong Republican, he could not forgive his former pupil for the coup d'état, and, except he Emperor after he ascended the throne.
an oficial ceremony in 1868, never sar Lo Bas died in 1860.
The Widow of Chiselhurst.
The ex-Empress Eugenie, who has just paid her usual visit to Paris on her way couth to Cape Martin, seems to be growing younger rather than older. The course of treatment she has followed for some time has benefited her so much that instead of remaining at her hotel to receive members and adherents of the Imperial family, she was able, for the first. time in many years, to pay calls in Paris. She surprised her nephew, Prince Rowland Bonaparte, by arriving unannounced at his house in the Avenue d'léna and send-ting up her card by an innocent footman, whose astonishment on learning the identity of the "Comtesse de Montijo" is said to have been perfectly ludicrous. The ex-Empress still carries a stick, but is quite able to walk without it. She has lately taken a fancy to the motor-car and used one of these vehicles for her Paris visits. It is, perhaps, hardly necessary to say that there is no truth whatever in the story that she and another lady re gently went to the Archives Nationales and asked to be allowed to see certain documents relating to the events of the librarian, who did not: know who they were. Neither is it a fact that her Majesty is writing her memoirs. Probing old wounds is about the last occupation in which the widow of Napoleon IIT would indulge.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.