On the day when I was being searched by Hungarian Bolshevists at Budapest I heard one of them say to another--having proved for himself the simplicity to which I was reduced: "Here is a king's daughter who is poorer than I am." I have thought of the unhappy women of Ypres, of Dixmude, of France, Poland, Servia, and elsewhere--unfortunate creatures without fire or bread through the crime of war, and I have wept for them and not for myself. More than one of them, perhaps, envied my position before 1914; little did they realize that I should have preferred theirs! Married at seventeen, I expected to find in marriage the joys that a husband and children can give. I have had bitter proof to the contrary. Rupture was inevitable where my own intimate feelings were concerned and those who surrounded me. I was too independent to make use of what was offensive to me. Honours are often without honour, however high they may seem to be. Save for rare exceptions, fortune and power only develop in us the appetite for pleasure and urge us to depravity. Those whom La Bruyère calls "the Great" easily lose the knowledge of human conditions. Life is to them no longer the mysterious proof of the existence of a soul which will be eventually rewarded or punished according to its deserts. Religion seems to them only a mask or an instrument. Led to judge their fellow-creatures through the flatteries, calculations, ambitions and treacheries by which they are surrounded, they arrive, through mistrust of human nature, at a state of indifference to God, and they accommodate His laws to their needs in the assurance of adjusting themselves with the Creator as they adjust their doings with their ministers. When I review the past, and when I am reminded of the various phases of my unhappy existence, I never despair of ultimately finding a justice which I have not yet come across in this world; I have always believed that it exists _somewhere_. If it were not so, things would be inconceivable. I owe this spirit of confidence to the lessons I learnt in my infancy, chiefly from those taught me by the Queen, my mother. "Always endeavour to be a Christian," she used to say. I could not understand the import of these words when I was a child, but the misfortunes of my life have helped to explain them. Stirred into revolt by humanity in so many ways, I have now submitted myself to a Superior Will, and I know the happiness of not hating my enemies. Pardon has always followed my rebellion. I have never doubted that those who wronged me would be punished sooner or later on earth or elsewhere, and I have been sorry for my persecutors. I have pitied them for their dislike of my frankness, because I am an enemy of all family and Court hypocrisy--I have pitied them for having censured my fidelity to one affection, and, above all, I have pitied their exaggeration of my disregard for that ancient idol--money!