That, as he did not actually slip in, was an auspicious beginning; and it is on record that Emperor and Empress and everybody else said, and sincerely meant, the right and proper and auspicious things. “The bride,” said the Austrian people—and the Hungarian people too—“is the most beautiful woman in all Christendom.” “I am glad,” Elizabeth wrote in the veteran Radetzky’s album, “that I am about to belong to a country which possesses an Emperor who is so great and good, and a hero of Radetzky’s valour.” “Never before,” said Francis Joseph to O’Donnell—the officer who had grappled with the tailor Libenyi, on the day of the attempted assassination—“did I feel so grateful to you for saving my life, for never before did I value my life so much”; and he showed his joy by pardoning prisoners and giving 200,000 florins to the poor; while the sympathies of the whole people followed the young couple when they departed on their honeymoon, and gathered edelweiss together, like any other honeymooning couple:— “The recollection of that April day,” wrote a witness of the scene, “will never be effaced from my mind. The old among us felt themselves young again, the sorrowful became glad, the sick forgot their pains, and the poor their poverty. All alike were eager to see the companion whom the Emperor had chosen as the partner of his life. God only knows how many tears of joy ran down our cheeks, and what ardent prayers were uttered by our lips.” It is easy to say, in the light of subsequent events, that the joy was too bright to last, and that the hope arose, only to be overcast; but it is difficult, setting superstition aside, to say why it was so, though it is not impossible to trace some of the steps by which it came to be so. In this exalted household two factors which are often seen at work in humbler households were presently, though not quite immediately, to play their part: a mother-in-law and an Egeria. The pity was the greater because, from the point of view of politics and the dynasty, the Emperor’s beautiful bride promised to be, and indeed was, an asset of great value. The popularity for which he had to work hard she achieved without an effort by the indefinable charm of her youth and loveliness, especially among the romantic and chivalrous Hungarians, who had not yet forgiven Francis Joseph for the severities of 1849. She had Hungarian blood in her veins, though her Hungarian ancestors were remote; and she had no responsibility for the atrocities of the repression. On the contrary, she made it clear to Hungarians that she sympathised with their sufferings and delighted in their country: its vast spaces and its heroic patriots, indomitable even though conquered.