She and the Dauphin were deeply in love with each other, and had been so since childhood; and it was like a sentence of death for the beautiful girl with the burnished copper-brown hair and flashing eyes, to learn that she was to be the bride of the long-faced, pallid boy, with the monstrous jaw and dull stare, in his gloomy palace far away from brilliant Versailles, and from her own home at Saint Cloud. When her father, the Duke of Orleans, and afterwards King Louis himself, gravely told her the honour that was in store for her, she implored them in an agony of passionate tears to save her from such a fate. To her stepmother, Charlotte of Bavaria, to the Queen Maria Theresa, to the King, she appealed on her knees, again and again, to let her stay in France, where she was so happy; and not to send her far away amongst people she did not love. She was told that her duty was to France; and Colbert, by the order of King Louis, drew up a serious State paper for the instruction of the frightened girl in the manner that French interests might be served by her as Queen of Spain. The fine pearl necklace, worth a hundred thousand crowns, given to her by King Louis, the magnificent diamonds brought by the Duke of Pastrana,[279] as a present to her from her future husband, the title of Majesty, ostentatiously given to her as soon as preliminaries were arranged, the fine dresses and jewels, and the new deference with which she was surrounded, only deepened the girl’s grief. Her heart grew hard and her spirit reckless when she understood that, regardless of her own feelings, she was to be a sacrifice: and, as the pompous ceremony of her marriage by proxy approached, she became outwardly calm, and more proudly beautiful than ever. On the 30th August 1679, as the new Queen was led by her father on one hand and the Dauphin she loved on the other, into the principal saloon at Fontainebleau for the formal betrothal to the Prince of Conti, representing the King of Spain, all the Court was enraptured at her peerless loveliness. Her train, seven yards long, of cloth of gold, was borne by princesses of the blood; and the magnificence that the Roi Soleil loved so well found its centre in the jewels that blazed over the young Princess who was being sacrificed for France.