Ranata turned her back upon the last vanity of the ancestor who had been a religion of her youth, and passing the equally lofty but far less imposing sarcophagus of Franz II., with the perfunctory receptacles of his four wives scattered near, she paused for a moment beside the long coffins of Napoleon’s second wife, and of him who had been called King of Rome and Duke of Reichstadt--he whom the French remembered as the second Napoleon when his cousin seized the throne. She stared down at the lead above the dust of the little cousin for whom she had much sympathy and compassion, knowing him to have been the victim of court intrigues, his soul and body systematically ruined. She wondered how much rebellion had beaten beneath that apparent docility, how much cunning, perhaps; biding his time in his grandfather’s old age, hating and fearing Metternich, yet neither wise enough nor strong enough to avoid the traps that never cut his feet, and closed about him as softly and warmly as sirens and drugs. She wondered if the French poet had divined the secretive nature correctly, or if a true Hapsburg brain had dissolved in the silences of the crypt; then, if the ruined soul had been graciously relit in consideration of its youth and ignorance; if, in some juster world, the fine brain he may have inherited might not now in its maturity be fulfilling the purpose for which it had sprung from a force that would still seem to haunt the earth. These were not the thoughts, the sulking superstitions, she had come to evoke, and she passed on. The alcove containing what was left of her mother and brother, with the angel between them presented by the ladies of Hungary, was before her, but she wished before kneeling and praying there to saturate herself with this subtle atmosphere of ancient death, of indestructible repose, of serene and final disassociation from the world above. This portion of the crypt is only two-thirds below ground. A high small window admits a patch of light by day; but the glass is heavy, and no sound penetrates. The Hapsburgs sleep as quietly as the Pharaohs.