“Rudolf had suffered frightfully from headaches for several months before he died, brought on by the dissipations into which he plunged to drown the miseries of his life. He was one of the most rarely gifted of the Hapsburgs, from the first Rudolf down; he had no responsibilities to occupy his brilliant and restless mind; he had a great weakness for women, and they pursued him; his domestic life was wretched; he sought oblivion in every possible way, and the autopsy proved that he had unhinged his brain. He undoubtedly killed himself in a wild moment of intolerable _ennui_ and disgust. That Marie Vetsera was present adds little to the significance of his death. It might as well have been any other woman, and Rudolf was incapable of the pathos of a romantic suicide. As to his insanity, it was not congenital; and there was no sign of it before he gave himself up to his last dissipations. “Ludvig was born with no other screw loose than an inordinate admiration of himself and the actor’s disposition to startle the world from the centre of the stage. All little kings--and some big ones--have a disproportionate idea of their own importance; and to realize the extreme point to which Ludvig, after his brain became clouded, carried this not unnatural delusion, you have only to visit his castle of Neu-Schwanstein and look at the throne room. It was not even built before Bavaria became a mere state of the German Empire, and yet it has the proportions and the splendor suitable for one of the three or four great monarchs of the earth. And this, not in his capital, but in one of his many castles! But Ludvig’s passion for beauty, his patronage of Wagner, and the splendid monuments he has raised in Bavaria to his own artistic genius, make him quite worthy of the inevitable legend. If you will look at his photographs, even those taken after he became gross and had suffered from many attacks of insanity, you will see that his eyes were always the eyes of the idealist. It was to this very idealism that he owed his insanity. Above all others was the monastic ideal of chastity, but he did not have the self-denial to live on monastic fare; and he was a king, and there was everything in his life to give his brain and imagination a preternatural activity. The consequence was periodical attacks of insanity, and the accentuation of his original peculiarities; towards the end, no doubt, he was vicious enough. The same thing might happen to any American, although, of course, centuries of interbreeding render the brain more susceptible to abnormal conditions. So much for Ludvig von Bayern, who in his youth was beautiful enough to demand from the very canvas absolution for all his vanities. As for poor Otto--recall all you know of the Duc de Reichstadt--I mean the young man of history, not of fiction.” Fessenden rose and thrust his hands into his pockets, staring at the ground. In a moment he raised his head and made the motion of flinging a load from his shoulders.