Of the many Lives of the Empress Elizabeth the most widely circulated has been the one entitled “The Martyrdom of an Empress”—a work which purports to give an authoritative “inside” view of the Habsburg Court. Even M. Jacques La Faye, the author of the very latest of the Lives, appears to have accepted it as a source of trustworthy information. The writer, who is known in America as a journalist, and implies that she was on terms of intimacy with the Empress, has doubtless raked together a good deal of floating Viennese gossip, but she nevertheless makes, on nearly every page, statements which it is hard to believe that she would have made if she had ever conversed with Elizabeth, or even been in the same room with her. A copy of “The Martyrdom of an Empress,” annotated in pencil by a lady once attached to the Austrian Court, is now lying on the writer’s table. “To read this book,” runs the first note, “is a martyrdom for one who knows”; and corrections of points of detail follow quickly—corrections, in many cases, of statements of little importance in themselves, but none the less completely destructive of the claim of the writer corrected to have studied the life of the Hofburg, or even of Gödöllo, from within. The Empress’s eyes, according to the author of “The Martyrdom of an Empress,” were “glorious dark blue orbs”—or, in another passage, “luminous sapphire-hued”: her eyes were actually brown. The Empress, according to the same authority, stamped “her little foot”; she actually had large feet, as became an energetic pedestrian, and is reputed to have been very jealous of the tiny feet of that rival beauty, the Empress Eugénie. Bismarck’s reptile Press, at one time, derided her for the size of her feet. And so forth. A few further passages of text, with the annotator’s gloss appended to each of them, will most effectually show the claim to inside knowledge evaporating under the incisive examination of one whose knowledge was really acquired inside:— AUTHOR: “The Duke (in Bavaria) was by no means a wealthy man, and all his disposable means were lavished upon the education of his older daughters.” COMMENTATOR: “There was only one older daughter, Helen, Princess of Thurn and Taxis.” * * * * * AUTHOR: “She hunted and shot with her brothers.” COMMENTATOR: “The Empress never took a gun in her hand—never touched one.” * * * * * AUTHOR: “All her love became centred upon little Archduchess Gisela, who had made her appearance in the world in 1856.” COMMENTATOR: “She never looked at the baby, and Archduchess Sophia took care of it.” * * * * *