Taking me by the hand, she led me and General Berzeviczy, who had also just arrived, to the next room. There lay the Empress, stiff and already cold, stretched on a little brass bed under a thin, white gauze veil. Her face, lit up by the flickering flame of two tall candles, showed no trace of suffering. A sad smile still seemed to hover over her pale and lightly-parted lips; two long tresses fell upon her slim shoulders; the delicate features of her face had shrunk; two purple shadows under her eyelids threw into relief the sharp outline of her nose and the pallor of her cheeks. She appeared as though sleeping peacefully and happily. Her tiny hands were crossed over an ivory crucifix; some roses, already almost withered--roses which she had gathered that morning and which she was carrying in her arms when she received her death-blow--lay scattered at her feet. I stood long contemplating the corpse. My self-possession deserted me. In spite of myself, the tears came to my eyes, and I cried like a child. * * * * * Why had fate decreed that the Empress should go to Geneva? Curiously enough, the idea came to her suddenly, it appeared, on Thursday, the 8th of September. She had arranged to pay a visit to her friend, Baronne Adolphe de Rothschild, who was staying at her country house, the Château de Pregny, at the western end of the lake. But it was a long excursion to make in a single day; and the Empress, contrary to the advice of Countess Sztaray, decided to sleep at Geneva, after leaving Pregny, and not to return to Caux until the following afternoon. She arrived at the Hôtel Beau Rivage in the evening and went out after dinner. She was up the next day at five o'clock. After filling a portion of her morning with the complicated cares of her toilet and her correspondence, she went for a walk along the shady quays of the Rhone. Returning to the hotel at one o'clock, she hurriedly drank a glass of milk. Then, accompanied by her lady-in-waiting, Countess Sztaray, she hastened down to the steamboat pier, intending to take the Territet boat that started at 1:40. She had come to within two hundred yards of the footplank connecting the steamer with the Quai du Mont Blanc, when Lucchini flung himself upon her and struck her a blow under the left breast with a three-cornered file clumsily fitted to a wooden handle. The violence of the blow broke her fourth rib.