with the nose to the wind, although aquiline;
but the curve finishes too abruptly; the nose,
beginning à la Bourbon, finishes à la Roxelane.
The caprice is not accomplished without
raising the upper lip, which ordinarily allows
a couple of white teeth to be seen.

The queen, whom every one saw at Paris,
has a lively eye, a bright complexion, and
prompt gestures; she becomes animated
while speaking, and shakes her marabouts,
which gives her more of merry gracefulness
than of royal dignity, especially as her forms,
rounded by a nascent embonpoint, are better
suited for tranquillity. The expression of
her look is singular, and pre-occupied by a
mixture of blunt simplicity and of compressed
raillery. Although short, she appears tall
when seated. She frequently changes colour:
has beautiful hair, long eyelashes, and fine
eyebrows, which melt into the satin sleekness
of her skin. There is a vague aspect of
the plump Parisienne, with an Anglo-
Germanic head. Her portraits, clumsy flatterers,
in order to endow her with the inert
beauty of the vignettes, have robbed her
countenance of all its character and vitality.

On each side of her was a lady, chosen with
too much discernment; and, at the back, the
Prince Albert. His complexion grows lighter
and lighter, in proportion as embonpoint
raises and stretches the tissues of the skin;
at the same time, his forehead loses its locks,
and the flower of youth is giving place to
prosaic maturity. You are less struck with
the regularity of his features than with the
air of good nature which distinguishes his
countenance. The husband of the queen is
esteemed; he was altogether sympathetic
before the commencement of the Russian
war; he interests those who behold him for
the first time, as would any man placed in a
difficult position in which he acquits himself
with honour. He is reported to be affable;
and, far from seeking to make himself of
importance, he resists every temptation to put
his influence in a conspicuous light. Finally,
he takes pains to show that his attention is
occupied with the progress of the Fine Arts,
as well as of every institution that bears on
social economy; and to seek nobody's favour
on any other grounds than those of his
modesty and his personal merits. Such conduct
evinces great talent, and something better than
talent. In England, the position given to Prince
Albert is more gravely appreciated than in
France, on Salic ground; and yet, in France,
especially, is there a gallant man, if only he be
married, who is not more or less the husband;
of the queen?

Monsieur Wey has doubts whether the
English take repose; but London never
sleeps—except once a week, as he afterwards
observes, on Sundays. At every hour of the
day, the workshops are full, and the haunts
of idleness are thronged to overflowing. One
knows that tlie town contains three millions
of souls; and, nevertheless, one is surprised to
see so many people everywhere at the same
time. The streets are crowded, whole
populations wander backwards and forwards on
the Thames, the parks are overscattered with
promenaders, the monuments with curious
inquirers: the gardens and the great houses
of the environs are invaded by nomad
visitors, and the movement never stops as long
as the week lasts. They eat at all hours, in
all places, and without cessation. The iron
constitution of these complaisant stomachs
permits them to repair their fatigues, by
means of an alimentary regime which would
satisfy the appetite of wolves and lions. The
bill of fare of a fair and pensive young girl
would prove the delight of a couple of
Parisian porters.

Parisians don't eat, don't they? Nor
Parisiennes either? If you entered a restaurant,
after a day at the Exposition, did the parties
of French ladies and gentlemen, who joined
your company there, partake of merely a
Barmecide feast?

Those strange places, the London, St.
Catherine, and West India Docks, are the
theatre of a prodigious movement. It seems
as if, to make such enormous piles of all sorts
of wares, they must have exhausted the
fecundity of the earth. There are spots
where you walk on sugar of the isles,
(contrasted, in the French mind, with beet-root
sugar); and the honied odour of the saccharine
produce, in this degree of concentration,
seizes you by the throat. Moreover, there
are preserved fruits, spices enough to convert
the Lake of Geneva into gravy, and logwood
enough to dye it purple; spirituous liquors
and cottons; perfumes and evil-smelling
drugs. In short, the nose meets with its
spectacles and its surprises.

You contemplate this commercial fairy-
land, beneath the shade of a forest of masts,
wending your way amongst clerks, casks, and
cables, on a path paved with plates of iron,
which are polished and sometimes broken by
the wheels of drays. It is here, especially,
that you form an opinion of the splendour,
the preponderance, and the wealth of this
nation, a monstrous polypus, whose suckers
absorb the substance of every country, and
whose body is here. But, almost
immediately, you meet with contrasts; a couple of
steps from this superabundance of everything,
you behold the deprivation of everything.
After the prodigies of mercantile luxury,
comes the hard and compulsory indolence of
want. The quarter Wapping, from the London
Docks to the Tunnel, is abandoned to
frightful indigence. You catch glimpses, in
courts full of filth and fetid sheds, of whole
families, haggard, in rags, out of health, and
in a state of uncleanliness which turns your
stomach. After you have seen the rags of
London, Callot's sketches look like plates
from the Journal des Modes. A man enters,
head-first, by some hole or other, into a
network of rags; he finds some point of issue