on had quite softened whatever brain
he may have had to begin with. This mental condition of his gave her the
care of their children, and in Metz their youngest son, their daughter a
girl of about twenty, and the director's little boy all lived together.
At holiday times another of her sons, a most charming young fellow, a
lieutenant in a crack cavalry regiment, used to visit them too. She
invited my sister and me to meet him, and the whole family often
attended the opera together. He liked me in several roles and used to
send me wonderful flowers. I still have a huge green bowl which he sent
me filled with violets, in return for the photograph for which he had
begged. He was an example of the most elegant type of young officer, the
aristocrat of _Uradlige Familie_, fair, with delicate features; his six
feet of slimness, with long slender limbs and very little body, clothed
in his glove-fitting uniform. He had the fashionable three creases
across the front of his smart Hussar jacket where his tummy should have
been. His poor little story turned into tragedy. He contracted
consumption and did not tell his people, but used their influence to get
himself transferred to German West Africa, on the plea of wanting to see
service. Arrived there, he quietly shot himself one evening as the
easiest way out of a life that promised him nothing but misery. A sort
of malignant fate seemed to pursue the children of that first marriage,
for the charming young daughter also came to a sudden and most tragic
end, as I shall tell later on.

The director's wife was very nice to us. She often invited us to visit
her although we did so but seldom. Her rooms were filled with relics of
her former life--portraits of herself as lady-in-waiting to the Empress
of Austria, in court dress, portraits of her Empress, old photographs of
groups on terraces and at castle gates, almost every person in them a
"personage." She herself still wore her hair as her Empress had done, in
a coronet of narrow braids set round her head. She said that they were
sewn together with the same coloured silk as the hair every morning
after being braided, to make them stand up. With us she always played
the _grande dame_, apparently quite without effort, but there were
stories about her which seemed to show that she could be something very
different.

She certainly could talk most interestingly of her former grandeur. One
of her tales was of a lady of the court who owned th