A stately banquet was held in the evening in the banqueting-room, hung round with royal portraits and historical pictures, the table heavy with gold and silver plate, including the gold plateau and the great gold vases filled with flowers. The King, in uniform, sat at the centre of the table. He had on his right hand Queen Victoria, wearing a gown of crimson velvet, the order of the garter and a _parure_ of diamonds and emeralds, but having her hair simply braided. On her other side sat Prince Joinville. On the King's left hand was Queen Louise. The Duchesse d'Orleans, in accordance with French etiquette for widows in their weeds, did not come to the dinner-table. Opposite the King sat his Queen, with Prince Albert on her right hand and the Duc d'Aumale on her left. The royal host and hostess carved like any other old-fashioned couple. The Queen received the same lively impressions from her first visit to France that she had experienced on her first visit to Scotland. Apart from the scenery there was yet more to strike her. The decidedly foreign dresses of the people, the strange tongue, the mill going on Sunday, the different sound of the church bells--nothing escaped her. There was also, in the large family of her brother king and ally--connected with her by so many ties, every member familiar to her by hearsay, if not known to her personally--much to interest her. The Queen had been, to all intents and purposes, brought up like an only child, and her genial disposition had craved for entire sympathy and equal companionship. She seems to have regarded wistfully, as an only child often regards, what she had never known, the full, varied, yet united life of a large, happy, warmly attached family circle. When she saw her children possessed of the blessing which had been denied to her in her early days, she was tempted to look back on the widowed restricted household in Kensington Palace as on a somewhat chill and grey environment. She has more than once referred to her childhood as dull and sad by comparison with what she lived to know of the young life of other children.