I am not, I am sure, the first woman who after having lived in the clouds during her engagement, has been as suddenly hurled to the ground on her marriage night, and who, bruised and mangled in her soul, has fled from humanity in tears. I am not the first woman who has been the victim of false modesty and excessive reserve, attributable perhaps to the hope that the delicacy of a husband, combined with natural instincts, would arrange all for her, but who was told nothing by her mother of what happens when the lover's hour has struck. However, the fact remains that on the evening of my marriage at the Château of Laeken, whilst all Brussels was dancing amid a blaze of lights and illuminations, I fell from my heaven of love to what was for me a bed of rock and a mattress of thorns. Psyche, who was more to blame, was better treated than myself. The day was scarcely breaking when, taking advantage of a moment when I was alone in the nuptial chamber, I fled across the park with my bare feet thrust into slippers, and, wrapped in a cloak thrown over my nightgown, I went--to hide my shame in the Orangery. I found sanctuary in the midst of the camellias, and I whispered my grief, my despair, and my torture, to their whiteness, their freshness, their perfume and their purity, to all that they represented of sweetness and affection, as they flowered in the greenhouse, and lit up the winter's dawn with a warmth, silence and beauty which gave me back a little of my lost Paradise. A sentry had noticed a grey form scurrying past him in the direction of the Orangery. He approached, and listening, recognized my voice. He hastened to the château. No one knew what had become of me. Already the alarm had been discreetly raised. A messenger galloped to Brussels. The telephone was not then invented. The Queen came to me without any delay. My God! what a state I was in when I regained my apartment; I would not let anyone approach me except my maids. I was more dead than alive. My mother stayed with me for a long time; she was as motherly as she alone could be. There was no grief which her arms and voice could not assuage. I listened to her scolding me, coaxing me and telling me of duties which it was imperative for me to understand. I dared not object to these on the ground that they were totally different from those which I had been led to expect. I finished by promising to try and conquer my fears, to be wiser and less childish. I was scarcely seventeen years old; my husband had completed his thirty-first year. I had become of his "goods and chattels." One can see, alas! how he has treated me. CHAPTER VII Married On the morrow of such a painful episode in the life of two newly married people I witnessed with bitter grief the preparations for my departure to Austria. Never was Belgium so dear to me; never had she appeared more beautiful.