Gossip charges her with doing more than scold—of throwing a mistress at the head of her son, and a lover at the head of her daughter-in-law, in order to estrange them from each other; but those who knew her declare her to have been too pious a woman to engage in such intrigues. Mischief-makers are often pious; and pious people are often mischief-makers; so it may have been so. But estrangement nevertheless soon succeeded to enthusiasm; and the present writer has the word of Countess Marie Larisch for the fact that Francis Joseph was the first—whether his mother’s promptings had any influence in the matter or not—to feel that the marriage had not yielded all that had been hoped for from it. He, at any rate, had felt the _coup de foudre_. The Empress had been too young to feel it, and had accepted an offer of marriage very much in the spirit in which she would have accepted an invitation to a ball. So she was not responsive, for they were not born to understand each other; and he, in his disappointment—keenly conscious of the very real, but impalpable, barrier between them—let his fancy stray. Then she, in the course of time, did the same; with the result that, even at the end of their married life, they were “strangers yet,” not openly, nor even privately, so far as anyone knows, at variance, but drifting apart, and each ceasing to take an interest in the other’s inner life. The process had already begun when Countess Marie Larisch saw the Empress weeping under a tree in the Bavarian Highlands. It had reached a further stage when the Empress sent for Countess Marie Larisch to live with her and be her confidante, and initiated her into her delicate duties at Gödöllo, her Hungarian hunting-box, with the significant warning:— “Listen, my child. At Gödöllo there is one thing to remember every hour of the day: You must not speak of anything which you hear or see, and your answers to questions must be ‘Yes,’ and ‘No,’ or ‘I don’t know.’” The time has since come when it has seemed good to Countess Marie Larisch to disregard that injunction, in her own defence, and to give the world rather a full account—albeit in the form of hints and insinuations—of a good many of the things which she heard and saw. She had, as she admits, her own very definite and somewhat delicate functions at Gödöllo; functions with the performance of which the Crown Prince Rudolph was, some years later, when she quarrelled with him, to reproach her: “You are a fine one” (Rudolph was to say) “to talk of honour or morality. You have been the go-between for my mother since you were a girl. And yet you dare to mention morality to me, when you have not scrupled to stand by and see my father deceived.”