The sovereigns themselves intimated by rising that the entertainment was at an end, while the knights made their appearance in the stand allotted to their dames, escorting them to the huge rooms of the palace set apart for the ball and the supper. These rooms were filled with flowers, and decorated with exquisite taste; a flood of light as brilliant as the orb of day showed the women in all their resplendent beauty; they and their champions became the centre of general admiration, the sovereigns having resumed the incognito, some of them, by the aid of dominos, disappearing altogether in the crowd. In the principal room there was a chief table with its service entirely of gold. It stood on a kind of platform a few feet from the ground, and was reserved exclusively for the royal guests of the Congress. To its left there was another table almost equally magnificent, set apart for the princes, the archdukes, the chiefs of reigning houses, and the ministers of the great Powers. To the right there was a third table of forty-eight covers for the actors of the tournament. Around the room and in the adjoining ones smaller tables were spread, at which the guests took their seats without distinction of rank. The perfume of the baskets of flowers, the glitter of the ornaments worn, the brilliancy of the diamonds, mingling with the colours of the floral decorations, and constituting, as it were, ever so many shifting rainbows, the sheen of the golden fruit-baskets--in short, the whole presented the most magnificent sight hitherto witnessed anywhere. The magic of that picture transported the spectator to one of the fairy scenes created by a poetic imagination. During the collation minstrels sang, to the accompaniment of their harps, lays to the beauty of the dames and to the valour of their knights. At the royal board the Empress of Austria was seated between the Kings of Prussia and Denmark. Emperor Francis had by his side respectively the Empress Elizabeth and the Grande-Duchesse d’Oldenbourg. A little further on was the charming Marie, Duchesse de Weimar, and by her side the Prince Guillaume de Prusse [the future Wilhelm I. King of Prussia and German Emperor]. The ‘immense’ King of Würtemberg looks, as usual, pre-occupied. The table, in front of him, has been cut away to accommodate his portly person. A glance at him causes one to speculate upon the potentiality of nature in stretching the human skin. King Frederick of Denmark supplies an instance to the contrary; but his intellect, his never-failing animation, his tact and the rest of his admirable qualities, which would have transformed an ordinary individual into a remarkable man, have made of this monarch a being worshipped by everybody. Excellent Maximilian of Bavaria shows on his open face the genuine expression of satisfaction and kindness.