Talking excitedly, gesticulating and striving to point out all the possible objects of interest at the same time as they asked questions about the journey, the Riguad family bore Emilie and Alice off down the hill to their home. It was a noisy, triumphant procession and Alice, white-faced and fair, walking in the midst of the dark haired and dark skinned Riguads, looked like a creature from another world.

The Riguads’ home was an old-fashioned shack, almost on the shore itself, but as their aunt and uncle explained, they were lucky to have that, although it meant a long way for the boys to walk to where they could graze the goats. The peasants’ houses in Monaco were few and in very bad repair. How could they be anything else when the whole Principality was impoverished and there seemed to be no possible way of improving conditions?

The Princess Caroline, wife of Florestan I, it was true, had tried to introduce lace making and the manufacture of perfumes among the industries of the Peninsula. There was also flower growing and the distillation of alcohol, but none of these seemed to be very successful and as communication with the outside world was so difficult it was easier in most cases to remain poor and hungry, but happy and lazy in the sunshine.

Certainly Emilie and Alice had been happy in the Riguads’ ramshackle house by the sea. Alice’s cough, the reason for which the whole journey had been undertaken, began to get better. It appeared regularly every winter when the raw winds swept across the flat plains of Brittany and the damp mists lay over the ground in the early morning.

Her face, too, lost that white pinched look and her laugh rang out more frequently. In Emilie’s eyes at any rate she seemed to assume a new beauty. Yes, they had been happy in those spring days nineteen years ago until something happened, something which even now Emilie could not remember without clenching her hands, without feeling the slow dull anger rise within her, virulent and malignant. She could see it all happening so clearly.

Alice in her blue frock, which matched the blue of her eyes, had taken the youngest Riguad child, a baby of two, up to the top of the rock to look at the Palace. Alice had been attracted by the Palace. She had never known much about Princes and Kings, for in the past eight years in Brittany people had seldom mentioned such exalted personages.

Now the Palace and its encircling walls and the high battlements appeared to fascinate her. It was her favourite walk. She would climb from the shore to the top of the rock to sit there and look at the Palace, watching the soldiers go in and out and occasionally seeing Prince Florestan come driving past, his carriage drawn by a pair of magnificent white horses.