That same night there was a banquet at the Palace of Fredensborg for the King, to which the staff of the Legation were invited. I remember only one thing about this dinner, and that is that we were given 1600 hock to drink. It was quite bitter, and had to be drunk with about five lumps of sugar in a glass.
After dinner, we stood round a large room while the Kings and Queens, the Emperor and Empresses and Princesses, went round and talked to the guests; and this was the end of a tiring day.
A few days later the King came to luncheon at the Legation.
There was one other Royal arrival which I shall never forget. I cannot place its date, but I think it must have been Queen Alexandra’s first visit as Queen to Copenhagen. But what I remember is this, that while we were waiting on the station platform, Queen Alexandra descended from the train all in black, with long floating veils, and threaded her way through the crowd of Royalties and officials, looking younger than anyone present, with still the same fairy-tale-like grace of carriage and movement that I remembered as a child, and with the same youthful smile of welcome, and with all her delicacy of form and feature heightened by her mourning and her long black veils, whose floating intricacy were obedient and docile to the undefinable rhythm of her beauty, and I remember thinking of Donne’s lines:
“No spring, no summer beauty has such grace As I have seen in one autumnal face.”
I spent that Christmas at Copenhagen, and on the 7th of January 1902 a dispatch came to say I had been transferred from the post of a Third Secretary at His Majesty’s Legation at Copenhagen to that of a Third Secretary of His Majesty’s Embassy at Rome. Before I left Copenhagen I had finished an article on Taine, an article on modern French literature, and an article on Sully Prudhomme, for the new edition of the _British Encyclopædia_.
I said that Sarah Bernhardt should have a chapter to herself.
“Les Comédiens,” said Jules Lemaître, “tiennent beaucoup de place dans nos conversations et dans nos journaux parce qu’ils en tiennent beaucoup dans nos plaisirs.” Amongst all the many pleasures I have experienced in the theatre, the acutest and greatest have been due to the art and genius of Sarah Bernhardt. Providence has always been generous and yet economical in the allotment of men and women of genius to a gaping world. Economical, because such appearances are rare; generous, because every human being, to whatever generation he belongs, will probably, at least once during his lifetime, have the chance of watching the transit, or a phase of the transit, of a great comet.