It is clear that in France all parties, and even those members of the Diplomatic Corps who were personally attached to the Empress, regretted, if they did not blame, her imprudence, for what had finally lighted the tinder was the expedition to Versailles. With all her love of French Art and her sympathy with the French "intellectuals"--her great admiration for Renan was well known--the Empress Frederick had always taken on the whole what may be called the German view of the French character--that is, she regarded the French as gay, frivolous, and lacking in ballast and in the deeper qualities of humanity. If they had been what their Imperial guest believed them to be, the nation as a whole would have shrugged its shoulders and diplomatically remained silent, however _froissée_ it might have been at such lack of tact on the part of a great personage. Some months later the Empress spoke of the matter to English friends with deep regret, but still with a curious lack of understanding. She even mentioned the subject to the then French Ambassador in London, M. Waddington, eagerly telling him that she had experienced nothing but respect and even sympathy during the first part of her visit, and expressing her astonishment and distress at the feeling her visit to Versailles and the battlefields round Paris had provoked. She had brought herself by then to share Queen Victoria's view, namely, that the whole thing had been a more or less histrionic demonstration against the French Government. It showed, however, the Empress's largeness of mind that during this same visit to England which followed her hasty departure from France she spoke with the warmest admiration of the verse of Paul Déroulède, the great chauvinist leader of the Revanche party. This was the last intervention of the Empress Frederick in public affairs. In the following year the Empress had the grief of losing a very old friend in the person of Lord Arthur Russell. Of these three gifted brothers, who were at once so alike and so different, she said pathetically: "The chief charm of the two others to me used to be that they were Lord Odo's brothers, until I came to know them well and to appreciate each other for his own sake." There burst forth, late in the year 1892, a most extraordinary scandal, in which the Empress Frederick, although the affair was almost ostentatiously unconnected with her, could not but be deeply interested.