“Well, at Vescova, and, with diminishing force, throughout all Monterosso, Queen Anéli is entirely misunderstood and sullenly misliked. Her husband cannot be called precisely the idol of his people, either; but he is regarded with indulgence, even with hopefulness; he is a Monterossan, a Pavelovitch: he may turn out well yet. Anéli, on the contrary, is an alien, a German, a Niemkashka. The feeling against her begins with the nobility. Save the half-dozen who are about her person, almost every mother’s son or daughter of them fancies that he or she has been rudely treated by her, and quite frankly hates her. I am afraid, indeed, they have some real cause of grievance; for they are most of them rather tedious, and provincial, and narrow-minded; and they bore her terribly when they come to Court; and when she is bored, as we have seen, she is likely to show it pretty plainly. So they say she gives herself airs. They pretend that when she isn’t absent-minded and monosyllabic, she is positively snappish. They denounce her as vain, shallow-pated, and extravagant. They twist and torture every word she speaks, and everything she does, into subject-matter for unfriendly criticism; and they quote as from her lips a good many words that she has never spoken, and they blame her savagely for innumerable things that she has never thought of doing. But that’s the trouble with the fierce light that beats upon a throne—it shows the gaping multitude so much more than is really there. Why, I have been assured by at least a score of Monterossan ladies that the Queen’s lovely brown hair is a wig; that her exquisite little teeth are the creation of Dr. Evans, of Paris; that whenever anything happens to annoy her, she bursts out with torrents of the most awful French oaths; that she quite frequently slaps and pinches her maids-of-honour; and that, as for her poor husband, he gets his hair pulled and his face scratched as often as he and she have the slightest difference of opinion. Monterossan ladies have gravely asseverated these charges to me (these, and others more outrageous, which I won’t repeat), whilst their Monterossan lords nodded confirmation. It matters little that the charges are preposterous. Give a Queen a bad name, and nine people in ten will believe she merits it.