He was always good-natured and indifferent--a middle-aged bachelor who had found life not hollow, but full--of food.
Nature having given me long legs (wherewith to give the slip to my responsibilities, and also to the bailiffs, as many of my female relatives have enjoyed saying), I could look over the heads of the majority of people present, and so saw the Emperor Napoleon III for the first time in my life.

The mind is, after all, a smaller thing than those who deny the existence of that which is beyond their comprehension would have us believe.

At that moment I forgot to think of all that lay behind those dull, extinguished eyes.

I forgot that this was a maker of history, and one who will be placed by chroniclers, writing in the calm of the twentieth century, only second to his greater uncle among remarkable Frenchmen, and merely wondered whether Napoleon III perceived the somewhat obtrusive emotion of my neighbour in the court uniform.
But a keener observer than myself could scarce have discerned the information on the still, pale features of the Emperor, who, indeed, in his implacability always reminded me more of my own countrymen than of the French.

The service was proceeding with that cunning rise and fall of voice and music which, I take it, has won not a few emotional souls back to the Mother Church.