The Grand Duchess Maria did not accompany her mother on this occasion. The King's engagement to his cousin, and his breaking off of it, had convinced the Empress that, amiable as he was as a friend, she would probably do wisely in cooling her ardour to possess him as a son-in-law. There is no doubt that the broken engagement had injured the Duchess Sophie's reputation; but it proved, nevertheless, that the incident had by no means diminished her chances of making another advantageous match. A reigning German Prince--a near relative of the King--went in the summer of 1868 to Munich with the intention of learning to know her, and of asking her hand. Another suitor had meanwhile been before him. On the 1st of July, 1868, the Duc de Nemours and his son had visited Possenhofen; and on the 11th of July of the same year, during a visit to Baden-Baden, the engagement of Sophie to Prince Ferdinand of Orleans, Duc d'Alençon was publicly announced. [14] Shortly afterwards the Prince and his father went to England to make arrangements for the new home. The wedding took place on the 28th of September, 1868, at eleven in the forenoon, in the royal chapel at Possenhofen. At the marriage, which was performed by the Abbé Haneberg, were present, besides the bride's parents and brothers, the Count and Countess di Trani, the Hereditary Princess Helene of Thurn and Taxis, and several of the Bavarian princes and princesses, also the Duc de Nemours, with both his daughters, the Comte de Paris, the Prince de Joinville, with his wife and son, and other members of the house of Orleans. The Empress of Austria and the ex-Queen of Naples, the latter with her husband, who had shortly before visited their paternal home, had left Bavaria immediately before the wedding. The Neuesten Nachrichten of Munich, from which I have gathered these details, is silent on the subject of an episode which has lately become known through Freiherr von Völderndorff's reminiscences of Prince Hohenlohe. In the midst of the ceremony Ludwig II. suddenly appeared, accompanied by the Empress of Russia, who was his guest at the time. His entrance had the most painful effect on all present. The King remained for over an hour in the home of the bride, apparently without in the least noticing the feeling of constraint which his presence occasioned. His determination to congratulate his former fiancée on her wedding-day was without doubt one of those momentary impulses which were continually fluctuating in the neurotic man's restless mind.