At first, no doubt, she showed a naïve delight at her sudden elevation to imperial dignity. The dramatic change in her fortunes appealed to her imagination; and it seemed as if all the glories of the world were hers. But—vanity of vanities! The years passed—a few years only—and Elizabeth had learnt the Preacher’s lesson. Even then, one suspects, the desires which haunted her were vague. She did not know exactly what it was that she wanted; but she knew only too well that, whatever it was, neither her marriage nor her exalted rank had given it to her; and we soon begin to hear of her long journeys in pursuit of the fugitive shadow, and of the mysterious melancholy which had visibly settled on her. She was still a young woman when she said to a confidante, _apropos_ of what one is left to guess: “I feel as if something had died in me.” She was not yet thirty when Countess Marie Larisch—a child who had climbed a tree—saw her in tears in circumstances which she has graphically described:— “I nearly fell out of the tree when I recognised the Empress, who had apparently given up the idea of riding, and was walking quite unattended.... Elizabeth came slowly to my tree, under which was a stone seat. She sat down, clasped her hands in a despairing kind of way, and began to cry silently. I could see that she was greatly distressed, for her face wore a hopeless expression, and occasionally a sob shook her. She then wept unrestrainedly, and at last I wondered whether I dared attempt to comfort her. I bent down, and as the leaves rustled with my sudden movement, the Empress looked up and saw me.” That is, perhaps, the most typical of all the pictures of her melancholy, though one could take many others from the writings of other chroniclers. She told the child she had been crying because her little daughter had been unwell during the night, but the child did not believe her. She told the child not to tell anyone that she had seen her cry, which she would hardly have troubled to do if her tears had had such a simple source. Some speeches attributed to her at other times would seem to indicate that she cried sometimes for lost illusions, like a child for a broken toy:— “The happiness which men seek in sincerity and ask from it is controlled by tragic laws. We all live on the edge of an abysm of grief and pain, dug for us by the falsehood of social morality. That is the abysm which separates our actual condition from the condition in which we ought to find ourselves. An abysm is always an abysm. The moment we try to cross it, we fall and break our limbs.”