laugh, but which, reported to her, as they assuredly would be, must have made her cheek flame and her lips quiver. Moreover, the Red Prince was notoriously in the habit of turning into jest some things more sacred in the eyes of the Imperial devotee than even her own reputation. She feared his tongue, his reckless wit, his smouldering ambition. She feared him for her boy, whose rival and enemy he might come to be; and Prince Napoleon had more sons than one. Therefore the rivalry was keen and bitter. She was for the Pope; he was for Italy and the Revolution. She sympathized with the South in the American civil war; Prince Napoleon was true to his principles and stood by the North. She favored the Mexican enterprise; he opposed it. She was for all manner of repressive action as regarded political speaking and writing; he was for a free platform and free press. Her triumph came when, during the Emperor's visit to Algeria, Prince Napoleon delivered his famous Ajaccio speech--a speech terribly true and shockingly indiscreet--and was punished by an Imperial rebuke, which led him to resign all his political offices and withdraw absolutely from public life for several successive years. But just when the Empress seemed to have the field all to herself, her political influence began somehow to wane. Perhaps she grew a little weary of the work of statecraft; perhaps she had not been so successful in some of her favorite projects as she had expected to be. The Mexican expedition turned out a dismal, ghastly failure, and that enterprise had always been regarded as the joint work of the two influences which cynical people say have usually been most disastrous in politics--the priest and the petticoat. Then the idea of working out the scheme of European politics from the central point of the Tuileries was suddenly exploded by the unexpected intrusion of Prussia, and the dazzling victory in which the Bonaparte as well as the Hapsburg was overthrown and humbled. The old framework of things was disjointed by this surprising event. A new political centre of gravity had to be sought for Europe. France was rudely pushed aside. The fair Empress, who had been training herself for quite a different condition of things, found herself now confronted by new, strange, and bewildering combinations. One thing is highly to her credit. I have been assured by people who claim to know something of the matter, that her earnest influence was used to induce the French Government to accept, without remonstrance, the new situation. While Louis Napoleon was committing the inexcusable blunder of feeling his way towards a war with Prussia, and thereby subjecting himself to the ignominy of having to draw hastily back, the voice of the Empress, I am assured, was always raised for peace. But I think the new situation was too much for her. She had made up for a game of politics between the Pope and Italy; when other players and other