She could, indeed. She would show them now, King, Queen, Hamilton, Greville, the World, that there was nothing beyond her, and the more difficult the better. She would win the Royal admiration, and with it under the Queen’s and Hamilton’s tuition she studied her new rôle—the politics of Europe. There, too, she would be prima donna, and Marie Caroline, used to the choice of instruments, tested this one in little things, and her heart rejoiced within her. For the day of great things was drawing on. PART III CHAPTER XVII NELSON 1793 THE terror and chaos which dominated the France of the Revolution had at last overflowed her coasts, and the vision of Marie Caroline was realized before the eyes of all the world. Driven by fear and hatred and a nascent sense of power, the young tiger that had tasted blood and mastery was not only standing at bay as formerly, but now making alarming springs on neighbouring territory. Here and there his swift paw struck and left its bleeding scores. What hope was there for Europe but a coalition, not only against the armed forces of France but also against her new and frightful gospel of Death to Despotism, to the Aristocrats, to the Kings? Death also to God—no peace until the last king had been strangled in the bowels of the last priest. One after another, silently, tremblingly, rallying, led by Austria whose royal daughter was in the hands of the murderers, the European nations herded together as frightened cattle herd when the howl of the wolf is heard at midnight. It is easy now for armchair philosophers to trace the features of liberty behind the mask of the Medusa and to hold to the belief that the root of democracy was watered by the blood that drenched the soil of France—not only royal blood, be it remembered, but the blood of the people also. It was more difficult at the end of the eighteenth century when, to most sober men, France had become a madness drunk with abominations, wild with bloody and sexual license, a shame to look upon, the enemy of God and man. The Queen of the Two Sicilies certainly made that view her religion and conscience. It was not wonderful. Every fragment of her mother’s, the great Empress Maria Theresa’s, policy, was being trampled to pieces by the French republicans before her eyes. Her doomed sister was in their hands, tortured daily and nightly with every fiendish cruelty the mind of man and woman could conceive—widowed by the guillotine, discrowned, and drawing daily nearer to the same fate. For, as Danton cried in his tremendous image: “The coalized kings threaten us; we hurl at their feet, as gage of battle, the head of a king.”