He interested me, but I did not like his sarcastic spirit. He had none of Rudolph's high ideals. When he disappeared I believed him to be living somewhere in secret, and that there was a possibility of his reappearance. I read in the papers not long ago that a person who might easily have been the Archduke John had just died in Rome, where he had lived for twenty years in seclusion. Rome attracts the solitary and disillusioned souls of the world. If this unknown man was really John Orth, he was indeed able to meditate on the grandeur and decadence of empires. I will leave this mysterious shadow and speak of two others who have passed, whose existence touches us more closely and constitutes a problem of State to minds interested in this subject. I see in imagination the ball where Francis Ferdinand d'Este showed by his attachment to the Countess Chotek what would eventually come to pass between them. He loved her and she loved him; they were married. This was a great event. The countess was clever and intelligent, and she was not personally displeasing to the Emperor. She knew better than to offend this narrow-minded being. But her rôle in the political events of central Europe, from the day when the death of Rudolph allowed her to dream of a throne (even though it was only that of Hungary), was more important than one imagined. It has occurred to me more than once, that if France had known and would have put up with an Austrian policy, she would have found that the Countess Chotek, raised to the rank of Duchess of Hohenberg, had far different ideas from those of Berlin. Unfortunately France committed the fault (and she will forgive me for daring to say so, _en passant_) of separating politics from religion, and of forgetting that religion is the first of all politics. She bound her own hands, bandaged her own eyes, and advanced on Europe. There was very little chance for her to reach the Danube, the most important of all the European routes. I knew how much the King of the Belgians deplored the blindness of France, and what he said on this subject to more than one distinguished Frenchman. It was to the effect that the disadvantage of democratic governments was that they were obliged to provide numerous schools of thought before they possessed the small number of principles which constitute the foundation and the whole secret of government. The religious principle is not the least of these. In a country in which statesmen formerly abounded, and which has ended politically through corrupt foolishness, that destroyer of characters and convictions, Countess Chotek, the woman of solid beliefs, came into prominence through the possession of a political brain.