Here, it seems, is the House of Habsburg betrayed by the members of the household; here are the very pillars of the temple, getting up, one after the other, and walking—or even running—away, careless whether the roof falls in, so long as they are not involved in the ruin; while Francis Joseph is left to sit almost alone in the midst of the scene of desolation: a pathetic figure, like Marius alone among the ruins of Carthage—or perhaps an heroic figure, like that strong man of whom Horace wrote that even the collapse of the universe would find him undismayed. We are coming to that spectacle in a moment; but the time for ringing up the curtain on it is not quite yet. The _tableau_ must be preceded by the scene of the assassination of the Empress. We are told that the Empress wrote Reminiscences, which will some day be published. Until they appear—if they ever do appear—the full history of her inner life cannot be written; and it may be impossible to write it even then. The gift of self-revelation is as rare as genius, if it is not, indeed, a kind of genius; and the men and women who have the art of communicating the secrets of their souls are far fewer than those who have secrets to communicate. It often happens that the world, asking for bread, is given a stone; asking, that is to say, for a confession, is given dark hints, and trivial tittle-tattle. It may prove to be so in this case; but no one knows. For Elizabeth guarded her secret to the end; and the world has no real knowledge of her, but only an impression, arising out of dark sayings, and a curious way of life. She was restless, and she sought solitude—one can say little more of her than that. What gadfly stung her, and drove her continually from place to place, one can but guess; and one is tempted, from time to time, to contradictory guesses. Perhaps the contradictions could be reconciled; perhaps more than one gadfly tortured her. She spoke of herself as a woman who dreaded death and yet saw nothing in life worth clinging to. She said that she had religious beliefs, and yet her favourite poet was Heine, who had none; and when Countess Starztay spoke to her of a peace beyond all understanding awaiting her when death had done its worst, she turned on her with the retort: “What do you know about that? No traveller who has taken that journey has ever returned to tell us what he found at the end of it.”