Hungary Water.
This is a spirit of wine distilled upon rosemary, and contains a powerful aroma of the plant. For many years it was mainly manufactured at Beaucaire and Montpellier, in France, where the plant grows in abundance. The name seems to signify that this water, so celebrated for its medicinal virtues, is an Hungarian invention; and we read in various books that the recipe for preparing it was given to a queen of Hungary by a hermit, or, as others say, by an angel, who appeared to her in a garden, all entrance to which was shut, in the form of a hermit or youth. Others affirm that Elizabeth, wife of Charles Robert, king of Hungary, who died in 1380, was the inventor. By often washing with this spirit of rosemary, when in the seventieth year of her age, she was cured, as we are told, of the gout and an universal lameness; so that she not only lived to pass eighty, but became so lively and beautiful that she was courted by the king of Poland, who was then a widower, and who wished to make her his second wife. Hoyer says that the recipe for preparing this water, written by Queen Elizabeth's own hand, in golden characters, is still preserved in the Imperial Library at Vienna. Beckmann says such is not the case.