s of the Queen, was sentenced to death for a crime of which there
was no scrap of evidence to point to his guilt.

This gross act of injustice proved to be the beginning of Christian's
downfall. His cruelties and oppressions had long made him odious to his
subjects, and the climax came when a popular uprising hurled him from
his throne and drove him an exile to Holland. An attempt to recover his
crown ended in speedy disaster, and his last years were spent, in
company with his favourite dwarf, in a cell of the Holstein Castle of
Sondeborg.

As for Sigbrit, the woman who had played such a conspicuous and baleful
part in Christian's life, she deserted her benefactor at the first sign
of his coming ruin and ended her days in her native Holland, bemoaning
to the last the loss of her "little dove," whom she had seen raised
almost to a throne and had lost so tragically.

CHAPTER IX

THE ROMANCE OF THE BEAUTIFUL SWEDE

Augustus the Strong, Elector of Saxony and King of Poland, owes his
place in the world's memory to his brawny muscles and to his conquest of
women. Like the third Alexander of Russia of later years, he could, with
his powerful arms, convert a thick iron bar into a necklace, crush a
pewter tankard by the pressure of a mighty hand, toss a heavy anvil into
the air and catch it as another man would catch a ball, or with a wrench
straighten out the stoutest horse-shoe ever forged.

And his strength of muscle was matched by his skill in the lists of
love. No Louis of France could boast such an array of conquests as this
Saxon Hercules, who changed his mistresses as easily as he changed his
coats; the fairest women in Europe, from Turkey to Poland, succeeded
each other in bewildering succession as the slaves of his pleasure, and
before he died he counted his children to as many as the year has days.

Of all these fair and frail women who thus ministered to the pleasure of
the "Saxon Samson," none was so beautiful, so gifted, so altogether
alluring as Marie Aurora, Countess of Koenigsmarck, the younger of the
two daughters of Conrad of Koenigsmarck. Born in the year 1668, Aurora
was one of three children of the Swedish Count Conrad and his wife, the
daughter of the great Field-Marshal Wrangel. Her elder sister, little
less fair than herself, found a husband, when little more than a child,
in Count Axel Loewenhaupt; her brother Philip, the handsomest man of his
day in Europe, was destined to end his days t