As for sightseeing in France, my mother and I did any amount of it on that first visit. Sometimes I was charmed but more often I was disillusioned. There have been few "sights" in my life that have come up to my "great expectations" or been half as wonderful as my dreams. This is the penalty of a too vivid imagination; nothing can ever be as perfect as one's fancy paints it. The view of Mont Blanc from the terrace of Voltaire's house near the borderland of France and Switzerland is one of the few in my experience that I have found more lovely than I could have dreamed it to be. Of all the palaces that I have been in--and they have numbered several--the only one that ever seemed to me like a real palace was Fontainebleau. Small but exquisite, it looked like a haven of rest and loveliness, as though its motto might well be: "How to be happy though a crowned head!" Speaking of crowned heads reminds me that while we were in Paris Mr. McHenry, our English friend from Holland Park, made an appointment for me to be presented to the ex-Queen of Spain, the Bourbon princess, Christina, so beloved by many Spaniards. I was delighted because I had never been presented to royalty and a Spanish queen seemed a very splendid sort of personage even if she did not happen to be ruling at the moment. Christina had withdrawn from Spain and had married the Duke de Rienzares. They lived in a beautiful palace on the Champs Élysées. There are nothing but shops on the site now but it used to be very imposing, especially the formal entrance which, if I remember correctly, was off the Rue St. Honoré. Mrs. and Mr. McHenry went with me and, after being admitted, we were shown up a marble staircase into what was called the Cameo Room, a small, austere apartment filled with cameos of the Bourbons. Queen Christina liked to live in small and unpretentious rooms; they seemed less suggestive of a palace.