Just as Marie-Antoinette had once scandalised the French Court by riding a donkey, so Elizabeth scandalised the Austrian Court by calling for beer—the excellent beer of Munich—and, according to some chroniclers, also for sausages, at the imperial luncheon table. She scandalised it a second time by refusing to throw her shoes away after she had worn them once; a third time by going shopping on foot, attended only by a single lady-in-waiting; a fourth time by taking off her gloves at a banquet at which etiquette prescribed that gloves should be worn, and laughing at the regulation when her attention was called to it. The anecdotes, thus summarised, seem trivial; but they have an inner significance as a record of an embittered conflict on that eternal theme: Which are the things that matter? For the Archduchess Sophia the things that mattered were those rites and ceremonies which distinguished Habsburgs from inferior members of the human family. Whatever were the things that mattered to Elizabeth—and she might have found it difficult to say what they were—they certainly were not these things. So that her case which, at the beginning, recalled the story of Cinderella, comes also to remind us, after the lapse of a little time, of the story of that Village Maiden, who was wooed and married by the Lord of Burleigh; and one thinks of the lines which tell us how her gentle mind was such That she grew a noble lady, And the people loved her much. But a trouble weighed upon her, And perplex’d her, night and morn, With the burthen of an honour Unto which she was not born. Faint she grew, and ever fainter, And she murmured, “Oh, that he Were once more that landscape painter, Who did win my heart from me!” So she droop’d and droop’d before him, Fading slowly from his side: Three fair children first she bore him, Then, before her time, she died. Or rather, as Elizabeth herself put it in the quotation from her table-talk already given, something died within her. Mme. de Boigne, it will be remembered, commenting on the story of the Lord of Burleigh, said that the fate of the Village Maiden served her right, and was a just and proper vindication of class distinctions. The Archduchess Sophia’s attitude towards Elizabeth was very similar. Just as the haughty Windischgraetz laid it down that “mankind begins with the baron,” so the Archduchess Sophia would seem to have held that mankind began at the confines of the imperial circle, and that the traditional manners and tone of that circle depended upon first principles and universal laws. So she had no sympathy for Village Maidens who set up their own likes and dislikes against the prescriptions of Habsburg ritual.