“What do you know about that? No traveller who has taken that journey has ever returned to tell us what he found at the end of it.”
That is hardly the language of Pantheism; and yet there were pompous believers who pointed at Elizabeth reproachfully as a Pantheist. One may conjecture that she tried to be a Pantheist, and succeeded sometimes, for a little while, and relapsed, from time to time, into uneasiness, and the sense of her personality as an Old Man of the Sea always on her back, and by no means to be thrown off. It often happens so when personalities are very pronounced, and experiences have been vividly individual. Inherited superstitions naturally confirm the tendency; and Elizabeth—sceptic though she seemed in orthodox circles—must have inherited more superstitions than she abandoned.
She evidently felt herself to be—and, in a sense, doubtless was—a woman who had survived herself. Something, as she said, had died in her; and life, after that death, was no more than a mechanical physiological round. Ill health may have helped to fix a sensation which, in good health, would only have been transitory; she was an invalid—albeit rather a vigorous invalid—during her later years. Her knowledge that there was madness in her family—the consequent sense of doom impending—may have conjured up the picture of Nemesis in pursuit of her; and she was not without reasons for telling herself that her failure in life had been signal. Even if she did not know just what it was that she had wanted, she must have been quite sure that, whatever it had been, she had failed to get it. There had been no happiness for her in family life, and as little happiness in love. In the former she had had the sense of tragedy without the compensation of affection; and, if the obvious interpretation of Countess Marie Larisch’s story be the true one, she had known what it was for a lover to ride away, leaving her to cynical reflections. So she went through life wearing a mask, and letting everyone see that she was wearing it.
So far as externals go, the picture can, of course, be given more detail. M. Xavier Paoli, of the Sûreté, whose function it was to shadow royalties in France, and protect them from assassins, has recorded many particulars of her eccentricities. She resented his attentions at first, and wanted to be left alone. “We shan’t want anybody,” were General Berzeviczy’s words to M. Paoli when he first introduced himself, and offered his services; but M. Paoli was a discreet man who knew how to make himself acceptable, always there when wanted, and never in the way when not wanted; and he observed what he saw with the keen eye of a detective for whom nothing is too minute to be remarked. From him we learn that the Empress bathed daily in distilled water, and took only one biscuit with her tea at breakfast, and refreshed herself later in the morning with “meat juice extracted daily from several pounds of fillet of beef by means of a special apparatus which she always carried with her,” and dined off iced milk, raw eggs, and a glass of Tokay.
M. Paoli also speaks of her long walks; for these, of course, were occasions on which the burden of his responsibilities weighed heavily upon him. Elizabeth often walked as much as fifteen or twenty miles in a day, with no one but her “Greek Reader”—some student, as a rule, of the University of Athens—in attendance. His function was not only to read Greek, but also to carry the Empress’s spare skirt. She walked “clad in a black serge gown of so simple a character that no well-to-do trades-woman would have cared to be seen in it”; and she often changed her skirt in the midst of her perambulations, behind trees, or any other screen which the landscape afforded, while the reader dutifully looked the other way. Sometimes, too, she perambulated the streets of Paris with equal recklessness. Once, M. Paoli recalls, she went to see Notre Dame by moonlight, and insisted upon being taken afterwards to eat onion soup in a popular café.
Biarritz and the Riviera, however, were the places at which M. Paoli saw most of her. At both resorts she was known as “the lady in black” who went about with a full purse, dispensing charity when the fit came upon her. Whenever she visited Biarritz, she never failed to buy a cow, to be sent to her farm in Hungary. At Cap Martin, where the Empress Eugénie recommended her an hotel, Francis Joseph sometimes came to see her; but he does not seem to have seen very much of her when he did come. Elizabeth “sometimes,” but by no means always, dined with him; and she invariably lunched alone. The visits, one cannot help feeling, were little more than tributes to those appearances which are so terribly important in imperial circles. It is added that the billiard-room was consecrated as a chapel; and perhaps in that act also a regard for appearances may be discerned.
A more important fact, from M. Paoli’s point of view, was Elizabeth’s reluctance to let him know where she was going, when she started for one of her walks. He generally managed to find out; but he nevertheless remonstrated, and received a characteristic reply:
“Set your mind at rest, my dear M. Paoli. Nothing will happen to me! what would you have them do to a poor woman? Besides, not one of us is more than the petal of a poppy or a ripple on the water.”
He assured her that there really was danger—that he had heard rumours; but she still refused to let herself be scared:
“What!” she exclaimed. “Still more of your fears. I repeat, I am not afraid; and, mind, I make no promises.”