Читать книгу Court Life From Within онлайн

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Like most children, I was not forgiving; I had not learned to tolerate the disloyalties to which life accustoms one; and I was disgusted by the cheerful falseness of the self-interest that brought these people about us. I began to look cynically at the show of devoted deference that makes the peculiar atmosphere of a Court. And then I forgot everything in the announcement that we were to join my brother in Spain—my dear brother, whom I thought of as a playmate, not as a king. I had missed him so much. I believed that I should always be happy now, since we were to be together.

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It is in life as it is in travelling, that you go sometimes with such unreflecting interest in the mere passing-by of the incidents of Time that you arrive unaware of your destination, and look back with dismay on the change and the distance. It was so I went from the democracy of our French class-room to the estate of Royalty in Spain. The mere journey itself was an excitement; and it was at once, even in France, almost a Royal progress, because of the number of Spanish ladies who had come to Paris to conduct my mother to the Court, to say nothing of the other people who had attached themselves to our suite for various reasons of their own.