Читать книгу The Uncrowned King - Baroness Orczy - Страница 15

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All this was so during the years previous to 1858. But since then things had been rather different. Madame la Princesse de Bourbon was installed, as usual, at the Villa Elisabeth, but Monsieur le Prince was hardly seen at all in Baden-Baden. It was generally understood that his health was none too good and that his physicians had advised a lengthy stay in Switzerland. Certain it is that in the past two years he had only paid very infrequent and short visits to his mother, and that while these visits lasted he hardly ever went out. He was no longer seen riding down the Allée, and the gaming-rooms at the Kurhaus saw him no more.

The fashionable coterie, as soon as it began to assemble for the season, wagged its head, and predicted the early demise of the young man: “These Bourbons have no stamina,” they said, and quickly forgot him. The Bonapartes and anti-royalists, on the other hand, declared that Madame la Princesse de Bourbon was wallowing in Austrian intrigues for the restoration of her son to the throne of France, and that Louis himself spent most of his time now over the border in Alsace where, if the Emperor’s police caught him, he would soon be sent to cool his heels, as Napoleon himself had done in his day, in the fortress of Ham.

Be that as it may, one thing was certain and that was that Baden-Baden had seen nothing for the past two years of the uncrowned King of France. But another circumstance in the private life of Madame la Princesse de Bourbon was puzzling the gossip-mongers far more than the absence of her son, and soon sent their tongues wagging nineteen to the dozen. This was the fact that Madame, who was known to be so very exclusive as to whom she admitted to her intimacy and so particular as to the houses she frequented, had recently paid a visit to Baron Albert Christophe, the great international financier, in his sumptuous Villa Marie-Thérèse. She went round his picture gallery, which was famous throughout Europe. She invited him to call at the Villa Elisabeth. Fair gossips said that she had done all this at the instance of Count Friesen, as Baron Christophe was of Austrian nationality. Friesen did not deny the soft impeachment. He only smiled and said something very charming to the fair questioner, as diplomats are in the habit of doing when the fair one is indiscreet.