In Brussels I became an enemy princess, and from the date of the Armistice I was proclaimed a foreigner in my native country in the interests of which I had been sacrificed at the age of seventeen, and I also saw myself deprived of the inheritance which would have become mine at the death of my aunt, the Empress Charlotte of Mexico. But it is a matter of history that my marriage with the Prince of Coburg was annulled in 1907 by the decision of the special tribunal of Gotha, judging according to the "Rights of Princes," and that this annulment was transmitted to the Court of Vienna. The divorce was ratified by all the minute forms of the law of Courts and the ancient statutes of Austria. The King officially gave me back my title of Princess of Belgium. That meant nothing; in Brussels no notice was taken of it. It is a fact that the law of Hungary does not recognize the "Rights of Princes" and the procedure of Gotha; in consequence of the possessions of the Coburg family in Hungary I am still a Princess of Coburg. I lose myself in this web in which I have been entangled, but common sense tells me that the disappearance of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, and the separation of Austria from Hungary has put an end to the "mixed state" and the position of "mixed subject" which was that of the Prince of Coburg. Through his ancestors, this "Austrian" Prince, Duke Philip of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, is of Franco-German and not of Hungarian origin. The princely union cancelled, the civil union dissolved, I feel I have been delivered, and that I have regained my Belgian nationality, thanks to the good will of the King himself. They have wished to ignore this at Brussels. They have branded me as a Hungarian because the Prince of Coburg has entailed estates in Hungary. Could they not just as well have proclaimed me a Turk or a Chinese had he possessed estates in Turkey or China? I question this; I make no reproaches whatever, especially against the principle of superior authority, for the good reason that this happened in a state whose king and queen had retreated before the invader in order to defend their country (one knows with what courage and self-denial) from the extreme frontier left them by a conquering enemy. They returned in triumph flushed with the joy of victory. They had only time to deal with general and momentous questions. I should like to think that the attitude adopted towards myself has been merely the outcome of a destiny which wills that I should become a stranger in my own country.