His one manly taste is for the chase. In sum, he is but a plexus of
weaknesses; the singing chambermaid of the stage, tricked out in
man's apparel, and mounted on a circus horse. I have seen this poor
phantom of a prince riding out alone or with a few huntsmen,
disregarded by all, and I have been even grieved for the bearer of
so futile and melancholy an existence. The last Merovingians may
have looked not otherwise.
The Princess Amalia Seraphina, a daughter of the Grand-Ducal house
of Toggenburg-Tannhauser, would be equally inconsiderable if she
were not a cutting instrument in the hands of an ambitious man. She
is much younger than the Prince, a girl of two-and-twenty, sick with
vanity, superficially clever, and fundamentally a fool. She has a
red-brown rolling eye, too large for her face, and with sparks of
both levity and ferocity; her forehead is high and narrow, her
figure thin and a little stooping. Her manners, her conversation,
which she interlards with French, her very tastes and ambitions, are
alike assumed; and the assumption is ungracefully apparent: Hoyden
playing Cleopatra. I should judge her to be incapable of truth. In
private life a girl of this description embroils the peace of
families, walks attended by a troop of scowling swains, and passes,
once at least, through the divorce court; it is a common and, except
to the cynic, an uninteresting type.
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