It was not on her father’s side only that there was insanity in her house. Her mother was a Bourbon Parma; and about the Bourbons of Parma, Princess Louisa neither has, nor affects to have, any illusions. They are madder than the Habsburgs, and have none of their redeeming qualities. The character sketches which Princess Louisa gives us of her maternal great-grandfather, Duke Charles of Parma, and Lucca, and of her uncle, Duke Robert of Parma, are sketches of lunatics; though the instinctive perception that the royal family party was a City of Destruction from which it was imperative to escape for self-realisation in the atmosphere of romance appears in her account of his relations with his Duchess, who “bored him to tears”:— “She was _dévote_ and excessively plain, and whenever he returned from a visit to Parma, he was wont to exclaim: ‘_Il faut absolument que j’aille me retremper auprès d’une jolie femme après ce tombeau de mon illustre compagne._’” Nor is that all; for Princess Louisa does not exhaust the subject. She might also have spoken of certain Parma cousins—nineteen children of a single father. Some sixteen of them are said to be, or to have been, of feeble intellect. One hears of one of them wandering about in the pathetic belief that she is Marie-Antoinette, carrying an orange with her, and insisting that it is her head which has recently been cut off. It is not difficult to picture Princess Louisa thinking her way to the conclusion that to be of royal birth was to come of tainted stock. She would be more likely to come to that conclusion if one may assume that the seeds of morbidity were latent in her even when her youthful high spirits concealed them. It would not have mattered—or, at any rate, it would have mattered less—if the truths of eugenics had been revealed to her in time, and she had fought, while still a girl, for the right to dispose of her heart as she chose. That is to say that a genuine romance, at that age, might have saved her from a great deal. But love did not come; and she was only a girl, and a sufficiently “good girl” to do as she was told, though not without a high-spirited girl’s disposition to laugh at uncongenial suitors. She laughed at Ferdinand of Saxe-Coburg, now King of Bulgaria, though she would probably have married him if there had not been a division of opinion in her family as to the desirability of the alliance; and she sums up the matter in retrospect thus:—