Oh! this palace of Coburg, this residence where the slightest frivolous fancy, the smallest evidence of Parisian taste imported from Brussels, provoked harsh words; this soupçon of a _décolletage_ which caused jealousy; this desire to live a little for myself, without being submissive to the rigorous routine of a barracks which aroused such storms. Mon Dieu! when I think of all this--the stuffed birds, the unhealthy books, the dirty jokes, and the daily miseries of my life--I am at a loss to know how I endured it. I ask myself how I could have resisted so long? It was worse in the long run than being shut up in the madhouse. The crime is sometimes less horrible than the criminal. There are moral deformities which constitute an offence at every turn, and in the end one becomes exasperated with them. I do not know to what extremes I should have gone if this life had continued. I have always looked upon the strength which permitted me, at the age of twenty, to break away from my princely cage as a direct help from Heaven. Even had I been able to foresee to what excess hatred and fury would reach, I would still have broken away. A palace can become a hell, and the worst hell is that where one suffocates behind gilded windows. Titles count for nothing--a bad household is a bad household. Two people are united, the same chain holds them irrevocably together. Certain couples manage to get on, others cannot. It is a question of temper and conditions. Neither the prince nor I could accustom ourselves to the differences which separated us. This permanent conflict, which was at first latent and which afterwards became open war, daily widened the abyss between us into which so much finally disappeared. But amidst all this bitterness my days had their golden hours. Everything was not disagreeable. Storms sometimes have a ray of sunshine. But those I experienced were of the most devastating nature! I have said that I respected Princess Clémentine and that I was attracted to her, but her deafness, which sadly aggravated her natural dignity, and her spirit of another age which made her always appear to be living in state and etiquette, often repulsed my natural outbursts of affection. Every time when the prince and I arrived at irreparable differences, and my mother-in-law, because of her great age, submitted to the influence of her son, I still could not help feeling towards her the same sentiment of gratitude which I had for her former kindness and her superiority of mind. [Illustration: PRINCE PHILIP OF SAXE-COBURG] Besides my husband, Princess Clémentine had two sons and two daughters. One of her sons, Auguste of Saxe-Coburg, was to me what Rudolph of Habsburg would have been, a brother-in-law who was a brother. Until his death, which took place, if I remember rightly, in 1908 at Paris, where, under the name of Count Helpa, he lived a life of pleasure and mixed in the best society, he retained the same affection for me that I had for him.