In December, 1885, just a month after his death, the date of my wedding was fixed, by Royal decree, for the following February. I remember that soon afterwards I received a visit from a girl friend of my own age who had come to say good-bye to me because she was entering a convent; and I thought, as I spoke to her, how much happier she was than I. I felt very sad, very depressed. I declared that I would only be married in mourning. They cried out against it, that it would bring me bad luck. What worse luck was left for me, I asked, except to die?--and I should not mind that. They yielded to me; February 26th was set for my wedding-day; but in the middle of the month I was taken ill of a fever that proved to be diphtheria, and on the 26th I had been for several days at the point of death; so I had a reprieve. It was a brief one. On March 5th, I was well enough to be taken into the big sitting-room in the evening, to sign the marriage contract before the necessary witnesses; and on the following day, still very weak, I was married in the Royal Chapel, with all the company dressed in deep mourning, and the church draped in black as for a funeral. I went away on our honeymoon, miserable, to the palace of Aranjuez; and, for once, I welcomed the Court etiquette that required us to be accompanied by a lady and a gentleman-in-waiting, since their presence saved me from a _tête-à-tête_ with my husband, for which neither of us had any inclination. One reads a great deal, in histories, of the immoralities of kings. What is one to expect of a man married in aversion to some foreign princess whom he is forced to take into his life for reasons of State that do not make her either beautiful to look at, or intelligent to talk to, or congenial to live with? If people will not allow a king to enjoy even the ordinary temptations to be virtuous, why should they exclaim if he seeks, outside of marriage, the happinesses of personal intercourse that are denied him in a wife? The fault is not in the kings. It is in the conditions that have required kings to be more than human beings and content with less than human beings. With the unfortunate queens it is different; they are raised in a guarded confinement of etiquette from which they can not easily escape; and they usually turn to religion and the hope of a happier world to console them for the stupid cares and gilded miseries that afflict them in this.