"Come hither, Charlotte," said she, "with your scissors." Charlotte approached noiselessly. "Cut off my hair," continued she, taking out her comb, and letting down the rich masses until it fell about her person like another shroud.
"No, your majesty, no," cried Charlotte, bursting into tears. "I never can cut off that magnificent hair."
"Good child," said the empress, "many a weary hour has that magnificent hair cost you, and do you ask to have it spared? It shall give you no more trouble. Take the scissors and cut it off!"
"Has your majesty then forgotten," pleaded Charlotte, "how dearly the emperor loved this hair?"
"No, Charlotte, and therefore he must have it. 'Tis the last love-token I have to give him. I cannot die with him like an Indian wife; but religion does not forbid me to lay this offering at least in his coffin. He used so often to pass his hands through it—he was so proud of its beauty, that now he is gone, no one else shall see it. Say no more, Charlotte, but cut it off."
The empress bent her head, while Charlotte, with a heart-felt sigh and
trembling hands, cut off the long and beautiful blond hair which Maria
Theresa laid as a love-token in the coffin of her husband. [Footnote:
Caroline Pichler. "Memoirs," vol. i., p.23.]
CHAPTER XXXII.
THE IMPERIAL ABBESS.
The funeral rites were over. In the crypt of the church of the Capuchins, under the monument which, twenty years before, the empress had built for herself and her husband, lay the body of Emperor Francis. In this vault slept all the imperial dead of the house of Hapsburg. One after another, with closed eyes and folded hands their marble effigies were stretched across their tombs, stiff and cold as the bones that were buried beneath. The eternal night of death reigned over those couchant images of stone and bronze.
But Maria Theresa and her emperor had conquered death. Both rising from the tomb, their eyes were fixed upon each other with an expression of deepest tenderness; while Azrael, who stood behind with a wreath of cypress in his hands, seemed to have transformed himself into an angel of love that sanctified their union even beyond the tomb.