_From an engraving after a painting by Mytens._ [_To face p. 130._] The adoption of Frau Pichler’s mother by the great Empress is just such a pathetic story, not without a pinch of the salt of romance, as would have touched the kind heart of Queen Victoria, and, indeed, we can well fancy her in like circumstances behaving exactly as Marie Theresia did. In the month of May, 1744, the Wolfenbüttel Regiment of Infantry was moved from Hungary to Vienna. A poor old lieutenant, fifty years of age, named Friedrich Hieronymus, a widower, had contrived—with what pains and anxiety who can tell?—to take with him on the march his only child, a little daughter aged four. Hardly had he reached Vienna when he caught a chill, inflammation of the lungs set in and he died, full of terror for the future of his little Charlotte, whom he was to leave penniless and destitute in what was to him a foreign country, among strangers professing a religion which was abhorrent to him—for he was a Protestant. His last tender words were for her. “Poor child! what will become of thee?” Throughout her long life those painfully uttered words, torn from the dying man’s soul, remained graven in her heart, unforgettable. His brother officers, good charitable souls, probably themselves none too well furnished with this world’s goods, took charge of the babe, who became from thenceforth the “fille du Régiment.” The pathetic story came to the ears of Marie Theresia, who had a soft place in her heart for the Wolfenbüttel Regiment, which was named after the family of her mother, the Empress Elizabeth. She sent for the child, but the officers of the regiment, deeply imbued with a sense of loyalty to their dead comrade, did all that was in their power to hinder the babe from falling into the hands of an aggressively religious Catholic. They hid her in a suburb of Vienna, but the Empress’s agents were too clever for them, and the child was brought to Court, where, as the Wolfenbüttlers had foreseen, she was brought up in the strictest doctrines of the Roman Church, under the charge of a Spanish lady, Isabella Duplessis, and was specially educated with a view to entering the Empress’s service as tirewoman. Her life was now very different from what might have been expected for the baby that followed the drum. She became the playmate of the Imperial children, amongst them of the unhappy Queen Marie Antoinette, and so the years went by in all the luxury of a sumptuous court.