There was, nevertheless, in the position of this girl something which, even in these circumstances, must have compelled her to think, or, at all events, to meditate, however confusedly, upon the present and the future. If she had in her the smallest spark of imagination she must have felt, to an acute degree, the sort of continuous surprise, recurring like the tick of a clock, which haunts us sometimes with the fact that it really does just happen to be ourselves to whom some curious lot, some rare combination of the numbers in life's lottery, has come. For the man whom she was going to marry--nay, to whom, in a sense, she was married already--the unknown whom she would see for the first time that evening, was not the mere typical bridegroom, the mere man of rank and fortune, to whom, whatever his particular individual shape and name, the daughter of a high-born but impoverished house had known herself, since her childhood, to be devoted.
Louise Maximilienne Caroline Emanuele, daughter of the late Prince Gustavus Adolphus of Stolberg-Gedern, Prince of the Empire, who had died, a Colonel of Maria Theresa, in the battle of Leuthen; and of Elisabeth Philippine, Countess of Horn, born at Mons in Hainaut, the 20th September 1752, educated there in a convent, and subsequently admitted to the half-ecclesiastic, half-worldly dignity of Canoness of Ste. Wandru in that town: Louise, Princess of Stolberg, now in her twentieth year, had been betrothed, and, a few weeks ago, married by proxy in Paris to Charles Edward Stuart, known to history as the Younger Pretender, to popular imagination as Bonnie Prince Charlie, and to society in the second half of the eighteenth century as the Count of Albany. The match had been made up hurriedly--most probably without consulting, or dreaming of consulting, the girl--by her mother, the dowager Princess Stolberg, and the Duke of Fitz-James, Charles Edward's cousin. The French Minister, Duc d'Aiguillon, in one of those fits of preparing Charles Edward as a weapon against England, which had more than once cost the Pretender so much bitterness, and the Court of Versailles so much brazenly endured shame, had intimated to the Count of Albany that he had better take unto himself a wife. Charles Edward had more than once refused; this time he accepted, and his cousin Fitz-James looked around for a possible future Queen of England. Now it happened that the eldest son of Fitz-James, the Marquis of Jamaica and Duke of Berwick, had just married Caroline, the second daughter of the widow of Prince Gustavus Adolphus of Stolberg-Gedern; so that the choice naturally fell upon this lady's elder sister, Louise of Stolberg, the young Canoness of Ste. Wandru of Mons.