o the
background. At the court balls in Vienna the duchess was always
obliged to walk behind all the archduchesses, and never had any
gentleman allotted to her whose arm she could take. In Roumania she
was _his wife_, and etiquette was not concerned with her birth. The
Archduke valued this proof of friendly tactfulness on the part of the
King very highly, and always afterwards Roumania, in his eyes, was
endowed with a special charm. Besides which he very correctly
estimated that a change in certain political relations would effect a
closer alliance between Roumania and ourselves. He felt, rather than
knew, that the Transylvanian question lay like a huge obstacle between
Vienna and Bucharest, and that this obstacle once removed would alter
the entire situation.

To find out the real condition of the alliance was my first task, and
it was not difficult, as the first lengthy conferences I had with King
Carol left no doubt in my mind that the old King himself considered
the alliance very unsafe. King Carol was an exceptionally clever man,
very cautious and deliberate, and it was not easy to make him talk if
he intended to be silent. The question of the vitality of the alliance
was settled by my suggesting to the King that the alliance should
receive pragmatic sanction, i.e. be ratified by the Parliaments at
Vienna, Budapest, and Bucharest. The alarm evinced by the King at the
suggestion, the very idea that the carefully guarded secret of the
existence of an alliance should be divulged, proved to me how totally
impossible it would be, in the circumstances, to infuse fresh life
into such dead matter.

My reports sent to the Ballplatz leave no doubt that I answered this
first question by declaring in categorical fashion that the alliance
with Roumania was, under the existing conditions, nothing but a scrap
of paper.

The second question, as to whether there were ways and means of
restoring vitality to the alliance, and what they were, was
theoretically just as easy to answer as difficult to carry out in
practice. As already mentioned, the real obstacle in the way of closer
relations between Bucharest and Vienna was the question of Great
Roumania; in other words, the Roumanian desire for national union with
her "brothers in Transylvania." This was naturally quite opposed to
the Hungarian standpoint. It is interesting, as well as characteristic
of the then situation, that shortly after my taking up office in
Roumania, Nikol