“But no son came, for when the child was born, the young Queen pressed to her heart a little daughter, with her Fairy father’s large black eyes. “‘Did she ever see him again,’ I asked, much interested. “‘I do not think so,’ replied the Empress, ‘when you have more experience of the world you will realise that a baby is the end of many love-affairs.’ “‘What did the King say?’ I queried. “‘He had too much vanity to say anything, whatever he may have suspected,’ said Elizabeth; she laughed her mocking laugh, and was her cynical self again.” All this, Countess Marie would have us think, is an allegory; but it is safer to leave the veil hanging over the facts, or alleged facts, which she means it to allegorise. Fairy Stories are not evidence—least of all when one only gets them, as in this case, at second hand; but, if this Fairy Story cannot be trusted for facts, at least it can be trusted for atmosphere, and both Elizabeth’s and Francis Joseph’s attitudes towards life seem to be displayed in it. Of his attitude we will speak at the appropriate time; hers strikes one as that of a woman who could not escape from her emotions and her longings, and yet never got any lasting satisfaction from the indulgence of them. Her life, on its sentimental side, one feels, was not continuous but episodical; not an epic poem, nor even a drama, but a series of short stories,—each of them ending, as Guy be Maupassant’s short stories so often do, in anti-climax. Hence the importance which she attached—and Countess Marie accumulates details about that—to the preservation of her beauty; for the dwindling of beauty necessarily made those “beginnings” which Mme. de Staël tells us “are always happy,” more difficult. Hence also those frequent journeys, apparently so meaningless, which give one the impression, not of a cultivated tourist eager to see the world, but of a shadow pursuing shadows, and brought to melancholy by the repeated failure to capture and hold them, and then continuing to travel as a means of escape from herself. Countess Marie quotes a speech which indicates that mood:— “Marie, sometimes I believe that I’m enchanted, and that after my death I shall turn into a seagull and live on the great spaces of the ocean, or sheltered in the crevice of some frowning rock; then I, the fettered Elizabeth, shall be free at last, for my soul shall have known the way of escape.” [Illustration: THE COUNTESS MARIE LARISCH AT THE TIME OF HER MARRIAGE.] Hence, again, the superstition which led her to consult fortune-tellers, and look for omens in glasses of water. Hence finally that cynicism already remarked, and further exemplified in another speech which Countess Marie reports:—