room after dinner, H. R. H. was good enough to ask me to sit next
him. Some train of thought was at work in the Prince's mind, for
he suddenly said, "Do you know that you are sitting next a man who
once took Napoleon I.'s widow, the Empress Marie Louise, in to
dinner?" and the Prince went on to say that as a youth of
seventeen he had accompanied his father on a visit to the Emperor
of Austria at Schonbrunn. On the occasion of a state dinner, one
of the Austrian Archdukes became suddenly indisposed. Sooner than
upset all the arrangements, the young Prince of Schleswig-Holstein
was given the ex-Empress to lead in to dinner.

I must again repeat that this is 1920. Napoleon married Marie
Louise in 1810.

Both my younger brother and I were absolutely fascinated by Paris,
its streets and public gardens. As regards myself, something of
the glamour of those days still remains; Paris is not quite to me
as other towns, and I love its peculiar smell, which a
discriminating nose would analyse as one-half wood-smoke, one-
quarter roasting coffee, and one-quarter drains. During the
eighteen years of the Second Empire, Paris reached a height of
material prosperity and of dazzling brilliance which she has never
known before nor since. The undisputed social capital of Europe,
the equally undisputed capital of literature and art, the great
pleasure-city of the world, she stood alone and without a rival.
"La Ville Lumiere!" My mother remembered the Paris of her youth as
a place of tortuous, abominably paved, dimly lit streets, poisoned
with atrocious smells; this glittering town of palaces and broad
white avenues was mainly the creation of Napoleon III. himself,
aided by Baron Georges Haussmann and the engineer Adolphe Alphand,