If I did not become mad in my asylum it was because I was not meant to do so; I could not become mad. But I still tremble when I think of it.
Later, when the King was dying, I recovered my liberty, and my freedom was brought about by my friend—a friend without equal, who, having on one occasion saved me from myself, now saved me from prison and madness, after having nearly succumbed himself beneath the blows of hate and persecution.
But my freedom constituted a new crime; my fidelity to an incarnate ideal in a whole-hearted devotion constituted an additional sin.
When I attended my father's funeral I was kept under constant observation. I was restricted to a certain area of my native country. The eldest daughter of the great King whom Belgium had just lost was received with polite formality by a police official in Court attire!
Ah, no! I incriminate no one—not even the servants whose civility I had once known. I am aware how tempting and profitable it is to mislead princes, and what power exists in wicked advice when it is given with an air of devotion. I am only explaining how it came about that I did not remain in my much-loved country.
At last the frightful war broke out, following the debates regarding the King's inheritance, and I was at once even more definitely suppressed by the Belgian nation because, to my other abominations, I had added the unpardonable sin of believing that justice existed in Belgium.
I was a prisoner in Munich, where I could do nothing. I was surprised in Bavaria by hostilities and treated like a Belgian princess—that is to say, very badly, as will be seen later.
In Brussels I became an enemy princess, and from the date of the Armistice I was proclaimed a foreigner in my native country in the interests of which I had been sacrificed at the age of seventeen, and I also saw myself deprived of the inheritance which would have become mine at the death of my aunt, the Empress Charlotte of Mexico.
But it is a matter of history that my marriage with the Prince of Coburg was annulled in 1907 by the decision of the special tribunal of Gotha, judging according to the "Rights of Princes," and that this annulment was transmitted to the Court of Vienna. The divorce was ratified by all the minute forms of the law of Courts and the ancient statutes of Austria. The King officially gave me back my title of Princess of Belgium.