It is not generally known--but it is true, nevertheless--that the King of Roumania is half French by descent. His grandmother on his father's side was a Princess Murat, and his maternal grandmother, as already mentioned, was a French lady well known to history as Stéphanie Beauharnais, the adopted daughter of the first Napoleon, and later, by her marriage, Princess Stéphanie of Baden. It is to this combination in his ancestry that people have been wont to ascribe some of the marked characteristics of the King. His personal appearance--notably the fine clear-cut profile--undoubtedly recalls the typical features of the old French nobility. Also the slight, symmetrical, and graceful figure is rather French Beauharnais than German Hohenzollern. His gift for repartee--_l'esprit du moment_, as it is so aptly styled--is decidedly French; and perhaps not less so his sanguine temperament, which has stood him in such good stead, and encouraged him not to lose heart in the midst of his greatest troubles, particularly years ago, when his subjects did not know and value him as they do now. An abnormal capacity for work and an absolute indifference towards every form of material enjoyment--or gratification of the senses--have also singularly fitted him for what posterity will probably deem to have been King Charles's most striking vocation: that of the politician. And his success as a politician is all the more remarkable, since his youthful training as well as his early tastes were almost exclusively those of the Prussian soldier. He even lacked the study of law and bureaucratic administration, which are commonly held to be the necessary groundwork of a political career. Yet not an atom of German dreaminess is to be detected in him; nor aught of roughness: little of the insensible hardness of iron; but rather something of the fine temper of steel--the elasticity of a well-forged blade--which, though it will show the slightest breath of damp, and bend at times, yet flies back rigid to the straight line. Thus I am assured is King Charles as a politician--not to be swayed or tampered with by influences of any kind, the sober moderation of an independent judgment has, in fact, never deserted him. It is also owing to a felicitous temperament that he has always been able to encounter opposition--even bitter enmity--without feeling its effect in a way common to average mankind.