But there were omens which others noticed even if Elizabeth herself was blind to them. It was observed that, while her reader was reading aloud from Marion Crawford’s _Corleone_—a romance dealing with the crimes of the Mafia—a raven wheeled and circled round the Empress, returning as often as it was driven away; and she told her suite, one morning, that the moon, seen at midnight from her bedroom window, had looked like the face of a woman weeping. Moreover, the Parisian sorceress who prophesied under the name of the Angel Gabriel had made a significant prediction: that one of the sensational events of the year would be—_l’assassinat d’une souveraine au cœur malade_. No Queen or Empress of the time was known to be suffering from physical heart disease; but Elizabeth was living as a woman whose heart was bowed by grief and sickened by disappointments. It must be to her, the superstitious whispered to each other, that the warning of the Angel Gabriel pointed. The fatal year was spent, as usual, in whirling about Europe: from Biarritz to San Remo; from San Remo to Caux; from Caux to Kissingen; from Kissingen to Bruckenau; from Bruckenau to Vienna—where Elizabeth shut herself up, and refused even to receive a newly-accredited ambassador; from Vienna to Lainz; from Lainz to Ischl; from Ischl to Nauheim; and from Nauheim back again to Switzerland, where she established herself in one of the hotels at Caux. At Caux she had, or thought she had, a vision which foreboded evil. A mysterious woman in white appeared in the hotel grounds, when the Empress was sitting on her balcony, and stared up at her with a fixed and menacing gaze. The sight made her nervous, and she told one of her retinue to send the woman away; but though every path in the hotel grounds was searched, and every bush was beaten, no woman in white could be discovered anywhere, and people remembered and recalled an old Austrian legend: that a woman in white always appeared on the eve of a Habsburg tragedy—had appeared at Schönnbrunn in 1867, and again in 1889, on the eve of the tragedies of Queretaro and Meyerling. Whether the suite believed in that legend none can say; the normal attitude of unphilosophic mankind towards such a legend is to discredit it, and yet, at the same time, to wonder whether there may not be “something in it.” The thing really to be dreaded was its possible effect on the Empress’s mind, already impressed by the omen of the circling raven, and the resemblance of the midnight moon to the countenance of a weeping woman. It was thought unwise, in the circumstances, to let her pay a promised visit to Baroness Adolphe Rothschild, in her villa at Prégny, near Geneva. But, though she was nervous, she was also obstinate. She spoke, as it was her habit to speak, as a fatalist: