“He was a tall, fine man, fair, stout, loud-voiced, and genial. He lived in an English boarding-house, where he did exactly as he liked. He trailed about most of the day in carpet slippers.” Some may think that that was carrying liberty to the verge of licence; but it is perhaps not less natural for an Archduke unwittingly to infringe the etiquette of boarding-houses than for a _parvenu_ to infringe the etiquette of Courts. In Austria, it has been said, the aristocracy dare not ask the professors to dinner for fear lest, if they were worldly enough to dress for the banquet, they should wear green ties with their dress clothes. Herr Wulfling, at any rate, spoke his mind about Courts and Kings—and also about his sister:— “Court life is stupid, dull, and wretched. Everything about it is insufferable. I cannot breathe at Court. A free man has the world at his feet, but a Prince or King is the puppet of his surroundings.” And also, on another occasion:— “Kings are just like other men. Not one in a hundred is worth a cent; perhaps even that is an exaggerated estimate. As for my sister, she is a crazy creature. At her age she might surely keep out of mischief.” That was rather an unkind criticism, especially so soon after he and Princess Louisa had made the plunge into the simple life together; but it appears that, though Princess Louisa had, like her brother, the courage of her convictions, she was more a creature of impulse, more inclined to pose, and less consistent in her view of the obligations of simplicity. Half the journalists of Europe had assembled at Geneva, as we have seen, to give her a gallery to play to; and she played to that gallery like an operatic star, taking the air with M. Giron daily, amid the applause of the collected populace, and thereby somewhat shocking the opinion of the rigid City of Calvin. This is how, speaking to the wife of an artist who called on her, she manifested her joy in her emancipation:— “What a happy woman you must be to be married to an artist who has a high standard, and tries to make his life square with it! Then you are free to do as you please, to dress as you like, to wear out your clothes. I have often to dress six times a day.” Perhaps. But Princess Louisa had engaged the whole of the first floor of the Hotel d’Angleterre for herself and her suite; and it was remarked that this proceeding seemed to reflect an Archduchess’s rather than an ascetic’s conception of simplicity. It was remarked, too, that her literary tastes, in so far as these could be inferred from the books which she borrowed from the Geneva libraries, appeared to be of a decadent modernity. Her favourite authors were discovered to be Gérard de Nerval and Baudelaire: excellent authors, indeed, but not authors whose message is for the simple and unsophisticated.