But kings and emperors, we are told by these _distant_ observers, are built that way; they would not be happy unless they made themselves unhappy for their people's sake. And as to queens and empresses,--they simply couldn't live if they didn't inspect their linen closets daily, stand over a broiling cook-stove, or knit socks for the offspring of inebriated bricklayers "and sich." Witness Louise, Imperial and Royal Highness, Archduchess of Austria, Princess of Hungary and Tuscany, Crown Princess of Saxony, etc., etc., smash these paper records of infallible royal rectitude, and superhuman, almost inhuman, royal probity! Had she castigated her own kind _after_ royalty unkenneled her, neck and crop, her story might admit of doubt, but she wrote these things while in the full enjoyment of her rank and station, before her title as future queen was ever questioned or menaced. Her Diary finishes with her last night in the Dresden palace. We do not hear so much as the clatter of the carriage wheels that carried her and "Richard" to her unfrocking as princess of the blood,--in short, our narrator is not prejudiced, on the defensive, or soured by disfranchisement. She had no axes to grind while writing; for her all kings dropped out of the clouds; the lustre that surrounds a king never dimmed while her Diary was in progress, and before she ceases talking to us she never "ate of the fish that hath fed of that worm that hath eat of a king." Yet this large folio edition of _obscenites royale_, chock full, at the same time, of intensely human and interesting facts, notable and amusing things, as enthralling as a novel by Balzac,--Louise's life record in sum and substance, since her carryings-on _after_ she doffed her royal robes for the motley of the free woman are of no historical, and but scant human interest. The prodigality of the mass of indictments Louise launches against royalty as every-day occurrences, reminds one of the great Catharine Sforza, Duchess of Milan's clever _mot_. When the enemy captured her children she merely said, "I retain the oven for more." _Royal Scandals_ Such scandalmongering! Only Her Imperial Highness doesn't see the obloquy,--sarcasm, cynicism and disparagement being royalty's every-day diet. Such gossiping! But what else was there to do at a court whose literature is tracts and whose theatre of action the drill grounds. But for all that, Louise's Diary is history, because its minute things loom big in connection with social and political results, even as its horrors and abnormalities help paint court life and the lives of kings and princes as they _are_, not as royalties' sycophants and apologizers would have us view them.