When on a visit to a country house it happened that Lord Hardinge’s room was next to the Disraelis’, and the next morning Mrs. Disraeli said to Lord Hardinge at breakfast, “Oh, Lord Hardinge, I consider myself the most fortunate of women. I said to myself when I woke this morning, ‘What a lucky woman I am! here I have been sleeping between the greatest orator and the greatest warrior of the day!’” Lady Hardinge, it was stated, did not look specially delighted. On the occasion of another visit it so happened that a former occupier of the house having possessed a number of fine paintings of the nude figure, the hostess had carefully removed from the walls all the pictures which she considered of doubtful propriety. One, however, had been overlooked and hung, as it chanced, in the room allotted to the Disraelis. Addressing her hostess, a lady of strictly puritanical views, Mrs. Disraeli said the first morning, “I find your house full of indecent pictures, there’s a horrible one in our room: Disraeli says it is Venus and Adonis; I’ve been awake half the night trying to prevent him looking at it!” Again, when her host apologised for a dish having too much onion in it, she said, “I prefer them raw.” At a concert at Buckingham Palace she sat next to a lady whom she did not know, and talked much of her own married happiness, and then remarked, “But perhaps, my dear, you do not know what it is to have an affectionate husband.” She had little respect of persons and always spoke her mind. Soon after her marriage, she and Disraeli went to a luncheon-party given by Bulwer at Craven Cottage on the Thames. They arrived late, and found that the party had already gone with their host up the river in a steamer. Another late arrival was Louis Napoleon.[37] He said he would get a boat and row them to meet the others. His rowing, however, turned out to be of an amateurish character, and he only succeeded in rowing them on to a mudbank in the middle of the river. Help was fortunately procured, and a serious mishap narrowly avoided. Mrs. Disraeli rated Louis Napoleon roundly: “You should not undertake things you cannot accomplish,” she told him. “You are always too adventurous.” In 1856, when Mrs. Disraeli was dining at the Tuileries, she reminded the Emperor of the incident, and the Empress Eugénie, who overheard, said, “Just like him.”