Both these elevated ladies, it will be recalled, wrote or talked in self-justification and with the usual stupidity of the guilty. We may dismiss their yarns as mere women’s gabble and return to the solid fact that Johann Salvator, impetuous, a little mad and smarting under his military humiliations, tried to mix into Balkan politics with the result that he found himself in the position of a bungling interloper, almost a betrayer of his country’s interests. Less than two years ago some further light was thrown upon the affair of the missing archduke through what have passed as letters taken from the Austrian archives after the fall of the Hapsburgs. These letters were published in various European and American newspapers and journals and they may be, as asserted, the veritable official documents. The portions I quote are taken from the Sunday Magazine of the _New York World_ of January 10 and January 17, 1926. I must remark that I regard them with suspicion. The first letter purports to be a report on the violent misconduct of Johann Salvator at Venice, as follows: “Consul General Alexander, Baron Warsberg, to the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Count Kalnoky: “I regarded it to be my duty to obtain information about the relations and meetings of Archduke Johann, and am sorry to have to report to Your Excellency that, _in a rather unworthy manner_, he had intercourse on board and in public with a _lady lodged on board of the yacht_, which intercourse has not remained unobserved and which he could not be induced to veil in spite of the remonstrances of (the President of the Chamber) Baron de Fin--Baron de Fin was so offended that, after much quarrel and trouble which made him ill, he left the ship and lodged in a little inn. He, on his part, reported to His Majesty the Emperor, and the Archduke is said to have, after five months of silence, written for the first time to His Majesty in order to complain of his Chamberlain. This unpleasant situation, still more troublesome abroad than it would have been at home, has been solved last Sunday, the 20th inst, by the sudden advent of Field Marshal Lieut. Count Uxküll, who brought the Imperial Order that His Imperial Highness immediately return to Orth at the Sea of Gmünden--to which he immediately submitted.