He read to several friends in Vienna what he had written about the murdered Empress Elizabeth. “I know it is full of exaggeration,” he admitted. “I did gown her with virtues she never thought of possessing and I have denied all her frailties. As I learn now, she was just an ordinary woman, and her surpassing vanity was the only extraordinary thing about her. But think how much she suffered and think of the man she was married to. Re-read, too, that story about the murdered Rudolph. When Count Something approached her to break the news, she ran to him wringing her hands and cried: ‘My Rudy is dead. Oh, my Rudy!’ What told this Niobe among royal women that her son had been destroyed—killed in a low debauch? When I reflect how she maintained her self-respect in a life of constant disappointment and tragedy, I think I did well making her out a noble soul.”
BREAKING THE NEWS GENTLY
Returning to Vienna from a flying trip to Budapest, Mark was full of “a yarn that would illustrate like a circus and run for five years, every Sunday a page.” He said he heard the story at the archduke Joseph’s country place, the same Joseph who, towards the end of the war, tried to make himself King of Hungary and failed, but the probabilities are that the story was Mark’s own, with Magyar trimmings. It ran as follows:
A great landowner, after a business trip of several months, returned to Budapest, and was met at the station by his carriage and pair that was to take him to his estate in the country.
“Everything well at home?” he asked the coachman.
“Excellently well,” replied the driver, cracking his whip.
After a while the Baron ventured another question:
“Why didn’t you bring my dogs along?” he asked.
“Dogs are sick, your Excellency.”
“My dogs sick? How did that happen?”