The service of Marie Theresia’s handmaidens was no sinecure. In summer she rose at five o’clock—in winter a little later—and rang for her girls, who had to appear fully dressed in hoop-petticoats, and with the marvellous edifices of hair which the fashion of the day exacted. To achieve this, the young ladies had to get up in the middle of the night, and this was especially hard upon Charlotte, who had night after night to read aloud for long hours after the Empress had gone to bed. But Charlotte was so quick, and knew the Empress’s taste so well that, whatever happened, she must be present at the morning toilette, and ready to attend upon her mistress during and after supper—a light meal, of which Her Majesty always partook in her private room. Busy worker as the Empress was, she seems to have depended entirely upon having her State papers read aloud to her, and so Charlotte became acquainted very early in life with many important State secrets. But she was a discreet little soul and knew how to hold her tongue, and so retained the confidence of her Imperial mistress so long as that wonderful woman lived. The portrait which Frau Pichler has left behind her of the great lady, partly drawn from her mother’s stories of her, partly from her own memories of the days when as a little girl she used to be taken by special command to Schönbrunn or the Burg in Vienna, is fascinating. In her youth the Empress had been extremely beautiful, and though in middle life she grew large and unwieldy, and had to be taken up to her rooms in a lift—wafted through the air by fairies, as it seemed to the child whom she took with her—she retained to the end that wonderful gift of grace and of what is called “presence,” which is so keenly felt and so impossible to describe. Kindly she was, too, and of a motherly sweetness with children. Frau Pichler tells us how on one occasion, when the Empress had sent her to an adjoining room on some small errand, she slipped and fell, breaking her fan, and burst into tears. The kind Empress hurried after her, comforted her, and gave her a new fan—a precious relic, to be treasured as we may well believe for a lifetime.