Why did fate decree that the very best of all the children of Victor Emanuel should have apparently the worst fortune? The Princess Clotilde is an exile from the country and the palace of her husband; and if the sweetness and virtue of one woman might have saved a court, the court of the Tuileries might have been saved by Victor Emanuel's eldest daughter. I have heard the Princess Clotilde talked of by Ultramontanes, Legitimists, Orleanists, Republicans, Red Republicans (by some among the latter who firmly believed that the poor Empress Eugénie was wickeder than Messalina), and I never heard a word spoken of her that was not in her praise. Every one admitted that she was a pure and noble woman, a patient wife, a devoted mother; full of that unpretending simplicity which, let us own it frankly, is one of the graces which very high birth and old blood do sometimes bring. The Princess must in her secret soul have looked down on some of the odd _coteries_ who were brought around her at the court of the Tuileries. She comes of a house in whose genealogy, to quote Disraeli's humorous words, "Chaos was a novel," and she found herself forced into companionship with ladies and gentlemen whose fathers and mothers, good lack! sometimes seemed to have omitted any baptismal registration whatever. I presume she was not ignorant of the parentage of De Morny, or Walewski, or Walewski's son, or the Jerome David class of people. I presume she heard what every one said of the Countess this and the Marchioness that, and so on. Of course the Princess Clotilde did not like these people--how could any decent woman like them?--but she accepted the necessities of her position with a self-possession and dignity which, offending no one, marked the line distinctly and honorably between her and them. Her joy was in her children. She loved to show them to friends, and to visitors even whom she felt that she could treat as friends. Perhaps she is not less happy now that the ill-omened, fateful splendors of the Palais Royal no longer help to make a gilded cage for the darlings of her nursery. Of the whole family, hers may be called the only career which has been doomed to what the world describes and pities as failure. It may well be that she is now happiest of all the children of the house of Savoy.