But exalted and serene as was His Highness, he was caught as helplessly in the toils of the Princess Aly as any lovesick boy; and within a week of making his first bow had her installed in his Castle of Oberstein, after satisfying the most clamorous of her creditors with borrowed money. That there might be no question of obligation, the Princess repaid him with the most lavish promises to redeem his heavily mortgaged estate with the millions she was daily expecting from Persia, and to use her great influence with Tsar and Sultan to support his claim to the Schleswig and Holstein duchies. And that he might be in no doubt as to her ability to discharge these promises, she showed him letters, addressed to her in the friendliest of terms by these august personages.

Each day in the presence of this most alluring of princesses forged new fetters for the susceptible Duke, until one day she announced to him, with tears streaming down her pretty cheeks, that she had received a letter recalling her to Persia—to be married. The crucial hour had arrived. The Duke, reduced to despair, begs her to accept his own exalted hand in marriage, vowing that, if she refuses, he will "shut himself up in a cloister"; and is only restored to a measure of sanity when she promises to consider his offer.

When Hornstein, the Duke's ambassador to Vienna, appears on the scene, full of suspicion and doubts, she makes an equally easy conquest of him. She announces to his gratified ears her wish to become a Catholic; flatters him by begging him to act as her instructor in the creed that is so dear to him; and she reveals to him "for the first time" the true secret of her identity. She is really, she says, the Princess of Azov, heiress to vast estates, which may come to her any day; and the first use she intends to make of her millions is to fill the empty coffers of the Limburg duchy.

Hornstein is not only converted; he becomes as ardent an admirer as his master, the Duke. The Princess takes her place as the coming Duchess of Limburg, much to the disgust of his subjects, who show their feelings by hissing when she appears in public. Her hour of triumph has arrived—when, like a bolt from the blue, an anonymous letter comes to Hornstein revealing the story of her past doings in several capitals of Europe, and branding her as an "impostor."

For a time the Duke treats these anonymous slanders with scorn. He refuses to believe a word against his divinity, the beautiful, high-born woman who is to crown his life's happiness and, incidentally, to save him from bankruptcy. But gradually the poison begins to work, supplemented as it is by the suspicions and discontent of his subjects. At last he summons up courage to ask an explanation—to beg her to assure him that the charges against her are as false as he believes them.

She listens to him with quiet dignity until he has finished, and then replies, with tears in her eyes, that she is not unprepared for disloyalty from a man who is so obviously the slave of false friends and of public opinion, but that she had hoped that he would at least have some pity and consideration for a woman who was about to become the mother of his child. This unexpected announcement, with its appeal to his manhood, proves more eloquent than a world of proofs and protestations. The Duke's suspicions vanish in face of the news that the woman he loves is to become the mother of his child, and in a moment he is at her knees imploring her pardon, and uttering abject apologies. He is now more deeply than ever in her toils, ready to defy the world in defence of the Princess he adores and can no longer doubt.

It is at this stage that a man who was to play such an important part in the Princess's life first crosses her path—one Domanski, a handsome young Pole, whose passionate and ill-fated patriotism had driven him from his native land to find an asylum, like many another Polish refugee, in the Limburg duchy. He had heard much of the romantic story of the Princess Aly, and was drawn by sympathy, as by the rumour of her remarkable beauty, to seek an interview with her, during her visit to Mannheim. Such a meeting could have but one issue for the romantic Pole. He lost both head and heart at sight of the lovely and gracious Princess, and from that moment became the most devoted of all her slaves.

When she returned to Oberstein he was swift to follow her and to install himself under her castle walls, where he could catch an occasional glimpse of her, or, by good-fortune, have a few blissful moments in her company. Indeed, it was not long before stories began to be circulated among the good folk of Oberstein of strange meetings between the mysterious young stranger who had come to live in their midst and an equally mysterious lady. "The postman," it was rumoured, "often sees him on the road leading to the castle, talking in a shadow with someone enveloped in a long, black, hooded cloak, whom he once thought he recognised as the Princess."

No wonder tongues wagged in Oberstein. What could be the meaning of these secret assignations between the Princess, who was the destined bride of their Duke, and the obscure young refugee? It was a delicious bit of scandal to add to the many which had already gathered round the "adventuress."

But there was a greater surprise in store for the Obersteiners, as for the world outside their walls. Soon it began to be rumoured that the Duke's bride-to-be was no obscure Circassian Princess; this was merely a convenient cloak to conceal her true identity, which was none less than that of daughter of an Empress! She was, in fact, the child of Elizabeth, Tsarina of Russia, and her peasant husband, Razoum; and in proof of her exalted birth she actually had in her possession the will in which the late Empress bequeathed to her the throne of Russia.

How these rumours originated none seemed to know. Was it Domanski who set them circulating? We know, at least, that they soon became public property, and that, strangely enough, they won credence everywhere. The very people who had branded her "adventuress" and hissed her in the streets, now raised cheers to the future Empress of Russia; while the Duke, delighted at such a wonderful transformation in the woman he loved, was more eager than ever to hasten the day when he could call her his own. As for the Princess, she accepted her new dignities with the complaisance to be expected from the daughter of a Tsarina. There was now no need to refer the sceptics to Circassia for proof of her station and her potential wealth. As heiress to one of the greatest thrones of Europe, she could at last reveal herself in her true character, without any need for dissimulation.

The curtain was now ready to rise on the crowning act of her life-drama, an act more brilliant than any she had dared to imagine. Russia was seething with discontent and rebellion; the throne of Catherine II. was trembling; one revolt had followed another, until Pugatchef had led his rabble of a hundred thousand serfs to the very gates of Moscow—only, when success seemed assured, to meet disaster and death. If the ex-bandit could come so near to victory, an uprising headed by Elizabeth's own daughter and heiress could scarcely fail to hurl Catherine from her throne.

It would have been difficult to find a more powerful ally in this daring project than Prince Charles Radziwill, chief of Polish patriots, who was then, as luck would have it, living in exile at Mannheim, and who hated Russia as only a Pole ever hated her. To Radziwill, then, Domanski went to offer the help of his Princess for the liberation of Poland and the capture of Catherine's throne.

Here indeed was a valuable pawn to play in Radziwill's game of vengeance and ambition. But the Prince was by no means disposed to snatch the bait hurriedly. Experience had taught him caution. He must count the cost carefully before taking the step, and while writing to the Princess, "I consider it a miracle of Providence that it has provided so great a heroine for my unhappy country," he took his departure to Venice, suggesting that the Princess should meet him there, where matters could be more safely and successfully discussed. Thus it was that the Princess said her last good-bye to her ducal lover, full of promises for the future when she should have won her throne, and as "Countess of Pinneberg" set forth with a retinue of followers to Venice, where she was regally received at the French embassy.

Here she tasted the first sweets of her coming Queendom—holding her Courts, to which distinguished Poles and Frenchmen flocked to pay homage to the Empress-to-be, and having daily conferences with Radziwill, who treated her as already a Queen. That her purse was empty and the bankers declined to honour her drafts was a matter to smile at, since the way now seemed clear to a crown, with all it meant of wealth and power. When the Venetian Government grew uneasy at the plotting within its borders, she went to Ragusa, where she blossomed into the "Princess of all the Russias," assumed the sceptre that was soon to be hers, issued proclamations as a sovereign, and crowned these regal acts by sending a ukase to Alexis Orloff, the Russian Commander-in-Chief, "signed Elizabeth II., and instructing him to communicate its contents to the army and fleet under his command."

Once more, however, fortune played the Princess a scurvy trick, just when her favour seemed most assured. One night a man was seen scaling the garden-wall of the palace she was occupying. The guard fired at him, and the following morning Domanski was found, lying wounded and unconscious in the garden. The tongues of scandal were set wagging again, old suspicions were revived, and once again the word "adventuress"—and worse—passed from mouth to mouth. The men who had fawned on her now avoided her; worse still, Radziwill, his latent suspicions thoroughly awakened, and confirmed by a hundred stories and rumours that came to his ears, declined to have anything more to do with her, and returned in disgust to Germany.

But even this crushing rebuff was powerless to damp the spirits and ambition of the "adventuress," who shook the dust of Ragusa off her dainty feet, and went off to Rome, where she soon cast her spell over Sir William Hamilton, our Ambassador there, who gave her the warmest hospitality. "For several days," we learn, "she reigns like a Queen in the salon of the Ambassador, out of whose penchant for beautiful women she has no difficulty in wiling a passport that enables her to enter the most exclusive circles of Roman society."

In Rome she lays aside her regal trappings, and wins the respect of all by her unostentatious living and her prodigal charities. She becomes a favourite at the Vatican; Cardinals do homage to her goodness, with perhaps a pardonable eye to her beauty. But behind the brave and pious front she thus shows to the world her heart is growing more heavy day by day. Poverty is at her door in the guise of importunate creditors, her servants are clamouring for overdue wages, and consumption, which for long has threatened her, now shows its presence in hectic cheeks and a hacking cough. Fortune seems at last to have abandoned her; and it requires all her courage to sustain her in this hour of darkness.

In her extremity she appeals to Sir William Hamilton for a loan, much as a Queen might confer a favour on a subject, and Hamilton, pleased to be of service to so fair and pious a lady, sends her letter to his Leghorn banker, Mr John Dick, with instructions to arrange the matter.

* * * * *

While the Princess Aly was practising piety and cultivating Cardinals in Rome, with an empty purse and a pain-racked body to make a mockery of her claim to a crown, away in distant Russia Catherine II. was nursing a terrible revenge on the woman who had dared to usurp her position and threaten her throne. The succession of revolutions, at which she had at first smiled scornfully, had now roused the tigress in her. She would show the world that she was no woman to be trifled with, and the first victim of her vengeance should be that brazen Princess who dared to masquerade as "Elizabeth II."

She sent imperative orders to her trusted and beloved Orloff, fresh from his crushing defeat of the Turkish fleet, to seize her at any cost, even if he had to raze Ragusa to the ground; and these orders she knew would be executed to the letter. For was not Orloff the man whose strong hands had strangled her husband and placed the crown on her head; also her most devoted slave? He was, it is true, the biggest scoundrel (as he was also one of the handsomest men) in Europe, a man ready to stoop to any infamy, and thus the best possible tool for such an infamous purpose; but he was also her greatest admirer, eager to step into the place of "chief favourite" from which his brother Gregory had just been dismissed.

When, however, Orloff went to Ragusa, with his soldiers at his back, he found that the Princess had already flown, leaving no trace behind her. He ransacked Sicily in vain, and it was only when Sir William Hamilton's letter to his Leghorn banker came to his hands that he discovered that she was in Rome, a much safer asylum than Ragusa. It was hopeless now to capture her by force; he must try diplomacy, and, by the hands of an aide-de-camp, he sent her a letter in which he informed her that he had received her ukase and was anxious to pay due homage to the future Empress of Russia.

Such was the "Judas" message Kristenef, Orloff's emissary, carried to the Princess, whom he found in a pitiful condition, wasted to a shadow by disease and starvation—"in a room cold and bare, whose only furniture was a leather sofa, on which she lay in a high fever, coughing convulsively." To such pathetic straits was "Elizabeth II." reduced when Kristenef came with his fawning airs and lying tongue to tell her that Alexis Orloff, the greatest man in Russia, had instructed him to offer her the throne of the Tsars, and, as an earnest of his loyalty, to beg her acceptance of a loan of eleven thousand ducats.

In vain did Domanski, who was still by her side, warn her against the smooth-tongued envoy. She was flattered by such unexpected homage, her eyes were dazzled by the near prospect of the coveted crown which was to be hers, at last, just when hope seemed dead. She would accept Orloff's invitation to go to Pisa to meet him. "As for you," she said, "if you are afraid, you can stay behind. I am going where Destiny calls me."

This revolution in her fortunes acted like magic. New life coursed through her veins, colour returned to her cheeks, and brightness to her eyes, as one February day in 1775 she left Rome, with the devoted Domanski for companion and a brilliant escort, for Pisa, where Orloff greeted her as an Empress. He gave regal fetes in her honour and filled her ears with honeyed and flattering words.

Affecting to be dazzled by her beauty, he even dared to make passionate love to her, which no man of his day could do more effectively than this handsomest of the Orloffs; and so infatuated was the poor Princess by the adoration of her handsome lover and the assurance of the throne he was to give her, that she at last consented to share that throne with him, and by his side went through a marriage ceremony, at which two of his officers masqueraded as officiating priests.

Nothing remained now between her and the goal of her desires, except to make the journey to Russia as speedily as possible, and a few hours after the wedding banquet we see her in the Admiral's launch, with Orloff and Domanski and a brilliant suite of officers, leaving Leghorn for the Russian flagship, where she was received with the blare of bands and the booming of artillery. The crowning moment arrived when, as she was being hoisted to the deck in a gorgeous chair suspended from the yard-arm, her future sailors greeted her with thunders of shouts, "Long live the Empress!"

The moment she set foot on deck she was seized, handcuffs were snapped on her wrists, and she was carried a helpless captive to a cabin. At the same moment Domanski was overpowered before he had time to use his sword, and made a prisoner.

The Princess's cries for Orloff, her husband and saviour, are met with derision. Orloff she is told is himself a prisoner. He has, in fact, vanished, his dastardly mission executed; and she never saw him again. Two months later the victim of a man's treachery and a woman's vengeance is looking with tear-dimmed eyes on "her capital" through a barred window of a cell in the fortress of Saints Peter and Paul.

Over the tragic closing of her days we may not dwell long. The scene is too pitiful, too harrowing. In vain she implores an interview with Catherine, who blazes into anger at the request. "The impudence of the wretch," she exclaims, "is beyond all bounds! She must be mad. Tell her if she wishes any improvement in her lot to cease the comedy she is playing." Prince Galitzin, Grand Chancellor, exerts all his skill in vain to force a confession of imposture from her. To his wiles and threats alike she opposes a dignified and calm front. She persists in the story of her birth; refuses to admit that she is an impostor.

Even when she is flung into a loathsome cell, with bread and water for diet, she does not waver a jot in her demeanour of dignity or in her Royal claims. Only when she is charged with being the daughter of a Prague innkeeper does she allow indignation to master her, as she retorts, "I have never been in Prague in my life, and if I knew who had thus slandered me I would scratch his eyes out." Domanski, too, proves equally intractable; even the promise of marriage to her will not wring from him a word that might discredit his beloved Princess.

But although the Princess keeps such a brave heart under conditions that might well have broken it, her spirit is powerless against the insidious disease that is working such havoc with her body. In her damp, noisome cell consumption makes rapid headway. Her strength ebbs daily; the end is coming swiftly near. She makes a last dying appeal to Catherine to see her if but for a few moments, but the appeal falls on deaf ears. When she sends for a priest to minister to her last hours, and, by Catherine's orders, he makes a final attempt to wrest her secret from her, she moans with her failing breath, "Say the prayers for the dead. That is all there is for you to do here."

Four days later death came to her release. Catherine's throne was safe from this danger at least, and she was left to dalliance with her legion of lovers, while the woman on whom she had wreaked such terrible vengeance lay deeply buried in the courtyard of her prison, the very soldiers who dug her grave being sworn to secrecy. Thus in mystery her life opened, and in secrecy it closed.



CHAPTER VIII

THE KING AND THE "LITTLE DOVE"

A savage murmur ran through the market-place of Bergen, one summer morning in the year 1507, as Chancellor Valkendorf made his pompous way along the avenues of stalls laden with their country produce, his passage followed by scowling eyes and low-spoken maledictions.

There could not have been a more unwelcome visitor than this cold-eyed, supercilious Chancellor, unless it were his master, Christian, the Danish Prince who had come to rule Norway with the iron hand, and to stamp out the fires of rebellion against the alien rule that were always smouldering, when not leaping into flame. Bergen itself had been the scene of the latest revolt against oppressive and unjust taxes, and the insolent Valkendorf, who was now taking his morning stroll in the market-place, was fresh from suppressing it with a rough hand which had left many a smart and longing for vengeance behind it.

But the Chancellor could afford to smile at such evidences of unpopularity. He knew that he was the most hated man in Norway—after his master—but he had executed his mission well and was ready to do it again. And thus it was with an air, half-amused, half-contemptuous, that he made his progress this July morning among the booths and stalls of the market, with eyes scornfully blind to frowns, but very wide open for any pretty face he might chance to see.

He had not strolled far before his eyes were arrested by as strangely contrasted a picture as any he had ever seen. Behind one of the stalls, heaped high with luscious, many-coloured fruits and mountains of vegetables, were two women, each so remarkable in her different way that, almost involuntarily, he stood rooted to the spot, gazing open-eyed at them. The elder of the two was of gigantic stature, towering head and shoulders over her companion, with harsh, masculine face, massive jaw, coarse protruding lips, and black eyes which were fixed on him in a magnetic stare, defiant and scornful—for none knew better than she who the stranger was, and few hated him more.

But it was not to this grim, hard-visaged Amazon that Valkendorf's eyes were drawn, compelling as were her stature and her basilisk stare. They quickly turned from her, with a motion of contempt, to feast on the vision by her side—that of a girl on the threshold of young womanhood and of a beauty that dazzled the eyes of the old voluptuary. How had she come there and in such company, this ravishing girl on whom Nature had lavished the last touch of virginal loveliness, this maiden with her figure of such supple grace, the proud little oval face with its complexion of cream and roses, the dainty head from which twin plaits of golden hair fell almost to her knees, and the eyes blue as violets, now veiled demurely, now opening wide to reveal their glories, enhanced by a look of appeal, almost of fear.

The Chancellor, who was the last man to pass by a flower so seductively beautiful, approached the stall, undaunted by the forbidding eyes of the giantess, Frau Sigbrit, by name, and, after making a small purchase, sought to draw her into amiable conversation. "No," she said in answer to his inquiries, "we are not Norwegian. We come from Holland, my daughter and I, and we are trying to earn a little money before returning there. But why do you ask?" she demanded almost fiercely, putting a protecting arm around the girl, as if she would shield her from an enemy. "You are in such a different world from ours!"

Little by little, however, the grim face began to relax under the adroit flatteries and courtly deference of the Chancellor—for none knew better than he the arts of charming, when he pleased; and it was not long before the Amazon, completely thawed, was confiding to him the most intimate details of her history and her hopes.

"Yes, my daughter is beautiful," she said, with a look of pride at the girl which transfigured her face. "Many a great man has told me so—dukes, princes, and lords. She is as fair a flower as ever grew in Holland; and she is as sweet as she is fair. She is Dyveke, my "little dove," the pride of my heart, my soul, my life. She is to be a Queen one day. It has been revealed to me in my dreams. But when the day dawns it will be the saddest in my life." And with further amiable words and a final courtly salute, Valkendorf continued his stroll, secretly promising himself a further acquaintance with the dragon and her "little dove."

This was the first of many morning strolls in the Bergen market, in which the Chancellor spent delightful moments at Frau Sigbrit's stall, each leaving him more and more a slave to her daughter's charms; for he quickly found that to her physical perfections were allied a low, sweet voice, every note of which was musical as that of a nightingale, a quiet dignity and refinement as far removed from her station as her simple print frock with the bunch of roses nestling in the white purity of her bosom, and a sprightliness of wit which even her modesty could not always repress.

Thus it was that, when Valkendorf at last returned to Upsala and the Court of his master, Christian, his tongue was full of the praises of the "market-beauty" of Bergen, whose charms he pictured so glowingly that the Prince's heart became as inflamed by a sympathetic passion as his mind by curiosity to see such a siren. "I shall not rest," he said to his Chancellor, "until I have seen your 'little dove' with my own eyes; and who knows," he added with a laugh, "perhaps I shall steal her from you!"

It was in vain that Valkendorf, now alarmed by his indiscretion, began to pour cold water on the flames he had lit. Christian had quite lost his susceptible heart to the rustic and unknown beauty, and vowed that he could not rest until he had seen her with his own eyes. And within a month he was riding into Bergen, with Valkendorf by his side, at the head of a brilliant retinue.

As the Prince made his way through the crowded avenues of the Bergen streets to an accompaniment of scowls punctuated by feeble, forced cheers, he cut a goodly enough figure to win many an admiring, if reluctant, glance from bright eyes. With his broad shoulders, his erect, well-knit figure clothed in purple velvet, his stern, swarthy face crowned by a white-plumed hat, Christian looked every inch a Prince.

To-day, too, he was in his most amiable mood, with a smile ready to leap to his lips, and many a gracious wave of the hand and sweep of plumed hat to acknowledge the grudged salutes of his subjects. He could be charming enough when he pleased, and this was a day of high good-humour; for his mind was full of the pleasure that awaited him. Even Frau Sigbrit's scowl was chased away when his eyes were drawn to her towering figure, and with a swift smile he singled her out for the honour of a special salute.

When the Prince at last arrived in the market-square, he was greeted by a procession of the prettiest maidens in Bergen who, in white frocks and with flower-wreathed hair, advanced to pay him the homage of demure eyes. But among them all, the loveliest girls of the city, Christian saw but one—a girl younger than almost any other, but so radiantly lovely that his eyes fixed themselves on her as if entranced, until her cheeks flamed a vivid crimson under the ardour of his gaze. "No need to point her out," he whispered delightedly to Valkendorf, "I see your 'little dove,' and she is all you have told me and more."

Before many hours had passed, a Court official appeared at Frau Sigbrit's cottage door with a command from the Prince to her and her daughter to attend a State ball the following evening. If the poor market-woman had had a crown laid at her feet, her surprise and consternation could scarcely have been greater. But she would make a bigger sacrifice of inclination than this for the "little dove" who filled her heart, and who, she remembered, was destined to be a Queen; and decking her in all the finery her modest purse could command and with a taste of which few would have suspected she was capable, the market stall-keeper stalked majestically through the avenue of gorgeous flunkeys, her little Princess with downcast eyes following demurely in her wake.

All the fairest women of Bergen were gathered at this ball, the host of which was their coming King, but it was to the fruit-seller's daughter that all eyes were turned, in homage to such a rare combination of beauty, grace, and modesty. Many a fair lip, it is true, curled in mockery, recognising in the belle of the ball the low-born girl of the market-place; but it was the mockery of jealousy, the scornful tribute to a loveliness greater than their own.

As for Prince Christian, he had no eyes for any but the "little dove" who outshone all her rivals as the sun pales the stars. It was the maid of the market whom he led out for the first dance, and throughout the long night he rarely left her side, whirling round the room with her, his arm close-clasped round her slender waist, not seeing or indifferent to the glances of envy and hate that followed them; or, during the intervals, drinking in her beauty as he poured sweet flatteries into her ears. As for Dyveke, she was radiantly happy at finding herself thus transported into the favour of a Prince and the Queendom of fair women, for whose envy she cared as little as for the danger in which she stood.

If anything had remained to complete Christian's infatuation, this intoxicating night of the ball supplied it. The "little dove" had found a secure nesting-place in his heart. She must be his at any cost. She and her mother alone, of all the guests, were invited to spend the rest of the night at the castle as the Prince's guests; and when he parted from her the following day, it was with vows on his part of undying love and fidelity, and a promise on hers to come to him at Upsala as soon as a suitable home could be found for her.

Thus easily was the dove caught in the toils of one of the most amorous Princes of Europe; but it must be said for her that her heart went with the surrender of her freedom, for the Prince, with his ardent passion, his strength and his magnetism, had swept her as quickly off her feet as she had made a quick conquest of him.

Thus, before many weeks had passed, we find Dyveke installed with her mother in a sumptuous home in the outskirts of Upsala, queening it in the Prince's Court, and every day forging new fetters to bind him to her. And while Dyveke thus ruled over Christian's heart, her strong-minded mother soon established a similar empire over his mind. With the clever, masterful brain of a man, the Amazon of the market-place developed such a capacity for intrigue, such a grasp of statesmanship and such arts of diplomacy that Christian, strong man as he thought himself, soon became little more than a puppet in her hands, taking her counsel and deferring to her judgment in preference to those of his ministers. The fruit-seller thus found herself virtual Prime Minister, while her daughter reigned, an uncrowned Queen.

When the Prince was summoned to Copenhagen by his father's failing health, Frau Sigbrit and her daughter accompanied him, one in her way as indispensable as the other; and when King James died and Christian reigned in his stead, the women of the Bergen market were installed in a splendid suite of apartments in his palace. So hopeless was his subjection to both that his subjects, with an indifferent shrug of the shoulders, accepted them as inevitable.

For a time, it is true, their supremacy was in danger. Now that Christian was King, it became important to provide him with a Queen, and a suitable consort was found for him in the Austrian Princess, Isabella, sister of the Emperor Charles V., a well-gilded bride, distinguished alike for her beauty and her piety. Isabella, however, was one of the last women to tolerate any rivalry in her husband's affection, and before the marriage-contract was sealed, she had received a solemn pledge from Christian's envoys that his relations with the pretty flower-girl should cease.

But even Christian's word of honour was seldom allowed to bar the way to his pleasure, and within a few weeks of Isabella's bridal entry into Copenhagen, Dyveke and her mother resumed their places at his Court, to his Queen's unconcealed disgust and displeasure. More than this, he established them in a fine house near his palace gates; and when he was not dallying there with Dyveke, he was to be found by her side at the Castle of Hvideur, of which he had made her chatelaine.

The remonstrances of Valkendorf and his other ministers were made to deaf ears; his wife's reproaches and tears were as futile as the strongly worded protestations of his Royal relatives. Pleadings, arguments, and threats were alike powerless to break the spell Dyveke and her mother had cast over him. But Dyveke's day of empire was now drawing to a tragic close. One day, after eating some cherries from the palace gardens, she was seized with a violent pain. All the skill of the Court doctors could do as little to assuage her agony as to save her life; and within a few hours she died, clasped to the breast of her distracted lover!

Such was Christian's distress that for a time his reason trembled in the balance. He vowed that he would not be separated from her even by death; he threatened to put an end to his own life since it had been reft of all that made it worth living. And when cooler moments came, he swore a terrible vengeance against those who had robbed him of his beloved. She had been poisoned beyond a doubt; but who had done the dastardly deed?

The finger of suspicion pointed to the steward of his household, Torbern Oxe, who, it was said, had been among the most ardent of Dyveke's admirers, and had had the audacity to aspire to her hand. It was even rumoured that he had had more intimate relations with her. Such were the stories and suspicions that passed from mouth to mouth in Christian's clouded Court before Dyveke's beautiful body was cold; and such were the tales which Hans Faaborg, the King's Treasurer, poured into his master's ears.

Hans Faaborg little dreamt that when he was thus trying to bring about the downfall of his rival he was sealing his own fate. Christian lent an eager ear to the stories of his steward's iniquities; but, when he found there was no shred of proof to support them, his anger and disappointment vented themselves on the informer. He had long suspected Faaborg of irregularities in his purse-holding, and in these suspicions found a weapon to use against him. Faaborg was arrested; an examination of his ledgers showed that for years he had been waxing rich at his master's expense, and he had to pay with his life the penalty of his fraud and his unproved testimony.

But Faaborg, though thus removed from his path, was by no means done with. Rumours began to be circulated that a strange light appeared every night above the dead man's head as he swung on the gallows. The city was full of superstitious awe and of whisperings that Heaven was thus bearing witness to the Treasurer's innocence. And even the King himself, when he too saw the unearthly light forming a halo round his victim's head, was filled with remorse and fear to such an extent that he had Faaborg's body cut down and honoured with a State funeral.

He was still, however, as far as ever from solving the mystery of Dyveke's death; and the longer his desire for vengeance was baffled, the more clamorous it became. Although nothing could be proved against Torbern Oxe, Christian was by no means satisfied of his innocence, and he decided to discover by guile the secret which all other means had failed to reveal. He would, if possible, make his steward his own betrayer. One day, at a Court banquet, he turned in jocular mood to the minister and said, "Tell me now, my dear Torbern, was there really any truth in what Faaborg told me of your relations with my beautiful Lady! Don't hesitate to tell the truth, which only you know, for I assure you no harm shall come to you from it."

Thus thrown off his guard and reassured, the steward, who, like his master, had probably drunk not wisely, confessed that he had loved Dyveke, and had asked her to be his wife. "But, sire," he added, "that was the extent of my offence. I was never intimate with her." During the remainder of the banquet Christian was most affable to the indiscreet steward, not only showing no trace of resentment, but treating him with marked friendliness.

The following day, however, Torbern was flung into prison, and charged, not only with his confession, but with the murder of the woman he had so vainly loved; and, in spite of the storm of indignation that swept over Denmark, the pleadings of the Papal Legate, Arcimbaldo, and the tears of the Queen, was sentenced to death for a crime of which there was no scrap of evidence to point to his guilt.

This gross act of injustice proved to be the beginning of Christian's downfall. His cruelties and oppressions had long made him odious to his subjects, and the climax came when a popular uprising hurled him from his throne and drove him an exile to Holland. An attempt to recover his crown ended in speedy disaster, and his last years were spent, in company with his favourite dwarf, in a cell of the Holstein Castle of Sondeborg.

As for Sigbrit, the woman who had played such a conspicuous and baleful part in Christian's life, she deserted her benefactor at the first sign of his coming ruin and ended her days in her native Holland, bemoaning to the last the loss of her "little dove," whom she had seen raised almost to a throne and had lost so tragically.



CHAPTER IX

THE ROMANCE OF THE BEAUTIFUL SWEDE

Augustus the Strong, Elector of Saxony and King of Poland, owes his place in the world's memory to his brawny muscles and to his conquest of women. Like the third Alexander of Russia of later years, he could, with his powerful arms, convert a thick iron bar into a necklace, crush a pewter tankard by the pressure of a mighty hand, toss a heavy anvil into the air and catch it as another man would catch a ball, or with a wrench straighten out the stoutest horse-shoe ever forged.

And his strength of muscle was matched by his skill in the lists of love. No Louis of France could boast such an array of conquests as this Saxon Hercules, who changed his mistresses as easily as he changed his coats; the fairest women in Europe, from Turkey to Poland, succeeded each other in bewildering succession as the slaves of his pleasure, and before he died he counted his children to as many as the year has days.

Of all these fair and frail women who thus ministered to the pleasure of the "Saxon Samson," none was so beautiful, so gifted, so altogether alluring as Marie Aurora, Countess of Koenigsmarck, the younger of the two daughters of Conrad of Koenigsmarck. Born in the year 1668, Aurora was one of three children of the Swedish Count Conrad and his wife, the daughter of the great Field-Marshal Wrangel. Her elder sister, little less fair than herself, found a husband, when little more than a child, in Count Axel Loewenhaupt; her brother Philip, the handsomest man of his day in Europe, was destined to end his days tragically as the price of his infatuation for a Queen.

Betrayed by a jealous woman, the Countess Platen, whose overtures he spurned, this too gallant lover of Sophia Dorothea of Celle, wife of the first of our Georges, was foully done to death in a corridor of the Leine Schloss by La Paten's hired assassins, while she looked smilingly on at his futile struggle for life, and gloated over his dying agonies.

On the death of her father, when she was but a child of three, Aurora was taken by her mother from her native Sweden to Hamburg, where she grew to beautiful young womanhood; and when, in turn, her mother died, she found a home with her married sister, the Countess Loewenhaupt. And it is at this period of her life that her romantic story opens.

If we are to believe her contemporaries, the world has seldom seen so much beauty and so many graces enshrined in the form of woman as in this daughter of Sweden. Her description reads like a catalogue of all human perfections. Of medium height and a figure as faultless in its exquisite modelling as in its grace and suppleness; her hair, black as a raven's plumage, and falling, like a veil of night, below her knees, emphasised the white purity of face and throat, arms, and hands. Her teeth, twin rows of pearls, glistened between smiling crimson lips, curved like Cupid's bow. Her face of perfect oval, with its delicately moulded features, was illuminated by a pair of large black eyes, now melting, now flaming, as mood succeeded mood.

To these graces of body were allied equal graces of mind and character. Her conversation sparkled with wit and wisdom; she could hold fluent discourse in half a dozen tongues; she played and sang divinely, wrote elegant verses, and painted dainty pictures. Her manner was caressing and courteous; she was generous to a fault, with a heart as tender as it was large. And the supreme touch was added by an entire unconsciousness of her charms, and an unaffected modesty which captivated all hearts.

Such was Aurora of Koenigsmarck who, in company with her sister, set forth one day to claim the fortune which her ill-fated brother, Philip, was said to have left in the custody of his Hanoverian bankers—a journey which was to make such a dramatic revolution in her own life.

Arrived at Hanover the sisters found themselves faced by no easy task. The bankers declared that they had nothing of the late Count's effects beyond a few diamonds, which they declined to part with, unless evidence were forthcoming that the Count had died and had left no will behind him—evidence which, owing to the secrecy surrounding his murder, it was impossible to furnish. And when a discharged clerk revealed the fact that the dishonest bankers had actually all the Count's estate, valued at four hundred thousand crowns, in their possession, the sisters were unable to make them disgorge a solitary mark.

In their extremity, they decided to appeal to the Elector of Saxony, who had known Count Philip well and who would, they hoped, be the champion of their rights; and, with this object, they journeyed to Dresden, only to find themselves again baffled. Augustus was away on a hunting excursion, and would not return for a whole month. His wife and mother, however, gave them a gracious reception, as charmed by their beauty and sweetness as sympathetic in their trouble.

When at last Augustus made his tardy appearance at his capital, the fair petitioners were presented to him by the Dowager Electress with words of strong recommendation to his favour. "These ladies, my son," she said, "have come to beg for your protection and help, to which they are entitled both by birth and their merits. I beg that you will spare no effort to ensure that justice is done to them."

His mother's pleading, however, was not necessary to ensure a favourable hearing from the Elector, whose eyes were eloquent of the admiration he felt for the two fairest women who had ever visited his land. Aurora's beauty, enhanced by her attitude of appeal, the mute craving for protection, was irresistible. From the moment she entered his presence he was her slave, as anxious to do her will as any lovesick boy.

And it was to her that, with his courtliest bow, he answered, "Be assured, dear lady, that I shall know no rest until your wrongs are repaired. If I fail, I myself will make reparation in full. Meanwhile, may I beg you and your sister to be my guests, that I may prove how deep is my sympathy, and how profound the respect I feel for you."

Thus it was that by the magic of beauty Aurora and her Countess sister found themselves installed at the Dresden Court, feted like Queens, receiving the caresses of the Court ladies, and the homage of every man, from Augustus himself to the youngest page, of whom a smile from their pretty lips made a veritable slave. As for the Elector, sated as he was with the easy smiles and favours of fair women, he gave to the Swedish beauty, from the first, a homage he had never paid to any of her predecessors in his affection.

But Aurora was no woman to be easily won by any man. She listened smilingly to the Elector's honeyed words, and received his attentions with the gracious complaisance of a Queen. When, however, he ventured to tell her that "her charms inspired him with a passion such as he had never felt for any woman," she answered coldly, "I came here prepared for your generosity, but I did not expect that your kindness would assume a form to cause me shame. I beg you not to say anything that can lessen the gratitude I owe you, and the respect I feel for you."

Here indeed was a rebuff such as Augustus was little prepared for, or accustomed to. The beauty, of whom he had hoped to make an easy conquest, was an iceberg whom all his ardour could not thaw. He was in despair. "I am sure she hates and despises me, while I love her dearer than life itself," he confessed to his favourite Beuchling, who vainly tried to console and cheer him. He confided his passion and his pain to Aurora's sister, whose hopeful words were alike powerless to dispel his gloom.

When Aurora held aloof from him, he sent letter after letter of passionate pleading to her by the hand of the trusty Beuchling. "If you knew the tortures I am suffering," he wrote, "your kindness of heart could not resist pitying me. I was mad to declare my passion so brutally to you. Let me expiate my fault, prostrate at your feet; and, if you wish for my death, let me at least receive my sentence from your own sweet lips."

To such a desperate state was Augustus brought within a few days of setting eyes on his new divinity! As for Aurora of the tender heart, her lover's distress thawed her more than a year of passionate protestations could have done. She replied, assuring him of her gratitude, her esteem and respect, and begging him to dismiss such unworthy thoughts of her. But she had no word of encouragement to send him in the note which her lover kissed so rapturously before placing it next his heart.

So alarmed, indeed, was Aurora, that she announced her intention of leaving forthwith a Court in which she was exposed to so much danger—a project to which her sister gave a reluctant approval. But the Countess Loewenhaupt was little disposed to leave a Court where she at least was having such a good time; for she, too, had her lovers, and among them the Prince of Fuerstenberg, the handsomest man in Saxony, whose devotion was more than agreeable to her. She preferred to play the part of Cupid's agent—to exercise her diplomacy in bringing together those two foolish persons, her sister and the Elector.

And so skilfully did she play her part, appealing to Aurora's pity, and assuring Augustus of her sister's love in spite of her seeming coldness, that before many weeks had passed Aurora had yielded and was listening with no unwilling ear to the vows of her exalted lover, now transported to the seventh heaven of happiness. One condition she made, when their mutual troth was plighted, that it should, for a time at least, remain a secret from the Court, and to this the Elector gratefully assented.

Such was the strange wooing of Augustus and the Countess Aurora, in which passion had its response in a pity which, in this case at least, was the parent of love.

It was with no very light heart that Aurora set forth to Mauritzburg, a few days later, to keep "honeymoon tryst" with Augustus, who had preceded her, to make, as she understood, the necessary preparations for her reception. With her sister and a mounted escort of the most beautiful ladies of the Court, she had ridden as far as the entrance to the Mauritzburg forest, when her carriage suddenly came to a halt in front of a magnificent palace. From the open door emerged Diana with her attendant nymphs to greet her with words of welcome, and to beg her to tarry a while to accept the hospitality of the forest gods.

In response to this flattering invitation Aurora left her carriage and was escorted in stately procession to a saloon, richly painted with sylvan scenes, in which a sumptuous banquet was spread. No sooner were she and her ladies seated at the table than, to the strains of beautiful music, the god Pan (none other than the Elector himself), with his retinue of fawns and other richly and quaintly garbed forest gods, made his entry, and took his seat at the right hand of his goddess. Then, to the deft ministry of Diana and her satellites, and to the soft accompaniment of pipes and hautboys, the feasting began, while Pan whispered love to the lady for whom he had prepared such a charming hospitality.

The banquet had scarcely come to an end when the jubilant sound of horns was heard from the forest. A stag dashed by a window in full flight, and Aurora and her ladies, rushing excitedly to the door, saw horses awaiting them for the hunt.

In a moment they are mounted, and, gaily laughing, with Pan leading the way, they are galloping through the forest glades in the wake of the flying stag and the music of the hounds, until the stag, hotly pursued, dashes into a lake, in the centre of which is a beautiful wooded island. Dismounting, the ladies enter the gondolas which are so opportunely awaiting them, and are rowed across the strip of water just in time to witness the death of the gallant animal they have been chasing.

The hunt over, Aurora and her ladies are conducted to the leafy heart of the island, where, as by the touch of a magician's wand, a gorgeous Eastern tent has sprung up, and here another sumptuous entertainment is prepared for them. Seated on soft-cushioned divans, in the many-hued environment of Oriental luxury, rare fruits and delicacies are brought to them in silver baskets by turbaned Turks. The island Sultan now appears, ablaze with gems, with his officers little less gorgeous than himself, and with deep obeisances craves permission to seat himself by Aurora's side, a favour which she was not likely to refuse to a Sultan in whom she recognised her lover, the Elector. Troupes of dancing-girls follow, and the moments fly swiftly to the twinkling of dainty feet, the gliding and posturing of supple bodies, and the strains of sensuous music.

Another hour spent in the gondolas, dreamily gliding under the light of the moon, and horses are again mounted; and Aurora, with Augustus riding proudly by her side, heads the splendid procession which, with laughter, and in the gayest of spirits, rides forth to the Mauritzburg Castle at the close of a day so full of delights.

"Here," was the Elector's greeting, as he conducted his bride to her room with its furnishing of silver and rich damask, and its pictured Cupid showering roses on the silk-curtained bed, "you are the Queen, and I am your slave."

Such was the beginning of Aurora's reign over the heart of the Elector of Saxony—a reign of unclouded splendour and happiness for the woman in whom pity for her lover was soon replaced by a passion as ardent as his own. Fetes and banquets and balls succeeded each other in swift sequence, at all of which Aurora was Queen, the focus of all eyes, and receiving universal homage, won no more by her beauty and her position as the Elector's favourite than by her sweetness and graciousness to the humblest. No mistress of a King was ever more beloved than this daughter of Sweden. Even the Elector's mother, a pattern of the most rigid propriety, had ever a kind word and a caress for her; his neglected wife made a friend and confidante of the woman of whom she said, "Since I must have a rival, I am glad she should be one so sweet and lovable."

We must hasten over the years that followed—years during which Augustus had no eyes for any other woman than his "uncrowned Queen," and during which she bore him a son who, as Maurice of Saxony, was to win many laurels in the years to come. It must suffice to say that never was Royal liaison conducted with so much propriety, or was marked by so much mutual devotion and loyalty.

But it was not in the nature of Augustus the Strong to remain always true to any woman, however charming; and although Aurora's reign lasted longer than that of any half-dozen of her rivals, it, too, had its ending. Within a month of the birth of her son, Augustus, now King of Poland, was caught in the toils of another enslaver, the beautiful Countess Esterle. Aurora realised that her sun had set, and relinquishing her sceptre without a murmur, she retired to the convent of Quedlinburg, of which Augustus had appointed her Abbess.

Thus in an atmosphere of peace and piety, beloved of all for her sweetness and charity, Aurora of Koenigsmarck spent her last years until the end came one day in the year 1728; and in the crypt of the convent she loved so well she sleeps her last sleep.



CHAPTER X

THE SISTER OF AN EMPEROR

When Napoleon Bonaparte, the shabby, sallow-faced, out-of-work captain of artillery, was kicking his heels in morose idleness at Marseilles, and whiling away the dull hours in making love to Desiree Clary, the pretty daughter of the silk-merchant in the Rue des Phoceens, his sisters were living with their mother, the Signora Letizia, in a sordid fourth-floor apartment in a slum near the Cannebiere, and running wild in the Marseilles streets.

Strange tales are told of those early years of the sisters of an Emperor-to-be—Elisa Bonaparte, future Grand Duchess of Tuscany; Pauline, embryo Princess Borghese; and Caroline, who was to wear a crown as Queen of Naples—high-spirited, beautiful girls, brimful of frolic and fun, laughing at their poverty, decking themselves out in cheap, home-made finery, and flirting outrageously with every good-looking young man who was willing to pay homage to their beaux yeux. If Marseilles deigned to notice these pretty young madcaps, it was only with the cold eyes of disapproval; for such "shameless goings-on" were little less than a scandal.

The pity of it was that there was no one to check their escapades. Their mother, the imposing Madame Mere of later years, seemed indifferent what her daughters did, so long as they left her in peace; their brothers, Kings-to-be, were too much occupied with their own love-making or their pranks to spare them a thought. And thus the trio of tomboys were left, with a loose rein, to indulge every impulse that entered their foolish heads. And a right merry time they had, with their dancing, their private theatricals, the fun behind the scenes, and their promiscuous love affairs, each serious and thrilling until it gave place to a successor.

Of the three Bonaparte "graces" the most lovely by far (though each was passing fair) was Pauline, who, though still little more than a child, gave promise of that rare perfection of face and figure which was to make her the most beautiful woman in all France. "It is impossible, with either pen or brush," wrote one who knew her, "to do any justice to her charms—the brilliance of her eyes, which dazzled and thrilled all on whom they fell; the glory of her black hair, rippling in a cascade to her knees; the classic purity of her Grecian profile, the wild-rose delicacy of her complexion, the proud, dainty poise of her head, and the exquisite modelling of the figure which inspired Canova's 'Venus Victrix.'"

Such was Pauline Bonaparte, whose charms, although then immature, played such havoc with the young men of Marseilles, and who thus early began that career of conquest which was to afford so much gossip for the tongue of scandal. That the winsome little minx had her legion of lovers from the day she set foot in Marseilles, at the age of thirteen, we know; but it was not until Freron came on the scene that her volatile little heart was touched—Freron, the handsome coxcomb and arch-revolutionary, who was sent to Marseilles as a Commissioner of the Convention.

To Pauline, the gay, gallant Parisian, penniless adventurer though he was, was a veritable hero of romance; and at sight of him she completely lost her heart. It was a grande passion, which he was by no means slow to return. Those were delicious hours which Pauline spent in the company of her beloved "Stanislas," hours of ecstasy; and when he left Marseilles she pursued him with the most passionate protestations.

"Yes," she wrote, "I swear, dear Stanislas, never to love any other than thee; my heart knows no divided allegiance. It is thine alone. Who could oppose the union of two souls who seek to find no other happiness than in a mutual love?" And again, "Thou knowest how I worship thee. It is not possible for Paulette to live apart from her adored Stanislas. I love thee for ever, most passionately, my beautiful god, my adorable one—I love thee, love thee, love thee!"

In such hot words this child of fifteen poured out her soul to the Paris dandy. "Neither mamma," she vowed, "nor anyone in the world shall come between us." But Pauline had not counted on her brother Napoleon, whose foot was now placed on the ladder of ambition, at the top of which was an Imperial crown, and who had other designs for his sister than to marry her to a penniless nobody. In vain did Pauline rage and weep, and declare that "she would die—voila tout!" Napoleon was inexorable; and the flower of her first romance was trodden ruthlessly under his feet.

When Junot, his own aide-de-camp, next came awooing Pauline, he was equally obdurate. "No," he said to the young soldier; "you have nothing, she has nothing. And what is twice nothing?" And thus lover number two was sent away disconsolate.

Napoleon's sun was now in the ascendant, and his family were basking in its rays. From the Marseilles slums they were transported first to a sumptuous villa at Antibes; then to the Castle of Montebello, at Naples. The days of poverty were gone like an evil dream; the sisters of the famous General and coming Emperor were now young ladies of fashion, courted and fawned on. Their lovers were not Marseilles tradesmen or obscure soldiers and journalists (like Junot and Freron), but brilliant Generals and men of the great world; and among them Napoleon now sought a husband for his prettiest and most irresponsible sister.

This, however, proved no easy task. When he offered her to his favourite General, Marmont, he was met with a polite refusal. "She is indeed charming and lovely," said Marmont; "but I fear I could not make her happy." Then, waxing bolder, he continued: "I have dreams of domestic happiness, of fidelity, virtue; and these dreams I can scarcely hope to realise in your sister." Albert Permon, Napoleon's old schoolfellow, next declined the honour of Pauline's hand, although it held the bait of a high office and splendid fortune.

The explanation of these refusals is not far to seek if we believe Arnault's description of Pauline—"An extraordinary combination of the most faultless physical beauty and the oddest moral laxity. She had no more manners than a schoolgirl—she talked incoherently, giggled at everything and nothing, mimicked the most serious personages, put out her tongue at her sister-in-law.... She was a good child naturally rather than voluntarily, for she had no principles."

But Pauline was not to wait long, after all, for a husband. Among the many men who fluttered round her, willing to woo if not to wed the empty-headed beauty, was General Leclerc, young and rich, but weak in body and mind, "a quiet, insignificant-looking man," who at least loved her passionately, and would make a pliant husband to the capricious little autocrat. And we may be sure Napoleon heaved a sigh of relief when his madcap sister was safely tied to her weak-kneed General.

Pauline was at last free to conduct her flirtations secure from the frowns of the brother she both feared and adored, and she seems to have made excellent use of her opportunities; and, what was even more to her, to encourage to the full her passion for finery. Dress and love filled her whole life; and while her idolatrous husband lavishly supplied the former, he turned a conveniently blind eye to the latter.

Remarkable stories are told of Pauline's extravagant and daring costumes at this time. Thus, at a great ball in Madame Permon's Paris mansion, she appeared in a dress of classic scantiness of Indian muslin, ornamented with gold palm leaves. Beneath her breasts was a cincture of gold, with a gorgeous jewelled clasp; and her head was wreathed with bands spotted like a leopard's skin, and adorned with bunches of gold grapes.

When this bewitching Bacchante made her appearance in the ballroom the sensation she created was so great that the dancing stopped instantly; women and men alike climbed on chairs to catch a glimpse of the rare and radiant vision, and murmurs of admiration and envy ran round the salon. Her triumph was complete. In the hush that followed, a voice was heard: "Quel dommage! How lovely she would be, if it weren't for her ears. If I had such ears, I would cut them off, or hide them." Pauline heard the cruel words. The flush of mortification and anger flamed in her cheeks; she burst into tears and walked out of the room. Madame de Coutades, her most jealous rival, had found a rich revenge.

General Leclerc did not live long to play the slave to his little autocrat; and when he died at San Domingo, the beautiful widow returned to France, accompanied by his embalmed body, with her glorious hair, which she had cut off for the purpose, wreathing his head! She had not, however, worn her weeds many months before she was once more surrounded by her court of lovers—actors, soldiers, singers, on each of whom in turn she lavished her smiles; and such time as she could spare from their flatteries and ogling she spent at the card-table, with fortune-tellers, or, chief joy of all, in decking her beauty with wondrous dresses and jewels.

But the charming widow, sister of the great Napoleon, was not long to be left unclaimed; and this time the choice fell on Prince Camillo Borghese, a handsome, black-haired Italian, who allied to a head as vain and empty as her own the physical graces and gifts of an Admirable Crichton, and who, moreover, was lord of all the famed Borghese riches.

Pauline had now reached dizzy heights, undreamed of in the days, only ten short years earlier, when she was coquetting in home-made finery with the young tradesmen of Marseilles. She was a Princess, bearing the greatest name in all Italy; and to this dignity her gratified brother added that of Princess of Gustalla. All the world-famous Borghese jewels were hers to deck her beauty with—a small Golconda of priceless gems; there was gold galore to satisfy her most extravagant whims; and she was still young—only twenty-five—and in the very zenith of her loveliness.

Picture, then, the pride with which, one early day of her new bridehood, she drove to the Palace of St Cloud in the gorgeous Borghese State carriage, behind six horses, and with an escort of torch-bearers, to pay a formal call on her sister-in-law, Josephine, Empress-to-be. She had decked herself in a wonderful creation of green velvet; she was ablaze from head to foot with the Borghese diamonds. Such a dazzling vision could not fail to fill Josephine with envy—Josephine, who had hitherto treated her with such haughty patronage.

As she sailed into the salon in all her Queen of Sheba splendour, it was to be greeted by her sister-in-law in a modest dress of muslin, without a solitary gem to relieve its simplicity; and—horror!—to find that the room had been re-decorated in blue by the artful Josephine—a colour absolutely fatal to her green magnificence! It was thus a very disgusted Princess who made her early exit from the palace between a double line of bowing flunkeys, masking her anger behind an affectation of ultra-Royal dignity.

Still, Pauline was now a grande dame indeed, who could really afford to patronise even Napoleon's wife. Her Court was more splendid than that of Josephine. She had lovers by the score—from Blanguini, who composed his most exquisite songs to sing for her ears alone, to Forbin, her artist Chamberlain, whose brushes she inspired in a hundred paintings of her lovely self in as many unconventional guises. Her caskets of jewels were matched by the most wonderful collection of dresses in France, the richest and daintiest confections, from pearl embroidered ball-gowns which cost twenty thousand francs to the mauve and silver in which she went a-hunting in the forest of Fontainebleau. At Petit Trianon and in the Faubourg St Honore, she had palaces that were dreams of beauty and luxury. The only thorn in her bed of roses was, in fact, her husband, the Prince, the very sight of whom was sufficient to spoil a day for her.

When, at Napoleon's bidding, she accompanied Borghese to his Governorship beyond the Alps, she took in her train seven wagon-loads of finery. At Turin she held the Court of a Queen, to which the Prince was only admitted on sufferance. Royal visits, dinners, dances, receptions followed one another in dazzling succession; behind her chair, at dinner or reception, always stood two gigantic negroes, crowned with ostrich plumes. She was now "sister of the Emperor," and all the world should know it!

If only she could escape from her detested husband she would be the happiest woman on earth. But Napoleon on this point was adamant. In her rage and rebellion she tore her hair, rolled on the floor, took drugs to make her ill; and at last so succeeded in alarming her Imperial brother that he summoned her back to France, where her army of lovers gave her a warm welcome, and where she could indulge in any vanity and folly unchecked.

Matters were now hastening to a tragic climax for Napoleon and the family he had raised from slumdom in Marseilles to crowns and coronets. Josephine had been divorced, to Pauline's undisguised joy; and her place had been taken by Marie Louise, the proud Austrian, whom she liked at least as little. When Napoleon fell from his throne, she alone of all his sisters helped to cheer his exile in Elba; for the brother she loved and feared was the only man to whom Pauline's fickle heart was ever true. She even stripped herself of all her jewels to make the way smooth back to his crown. And when at last news came to her at Rome of his death at St Helena it was she who shed the bitterest tears and refused to be comforted. That an empire was lost, was nothing compared with the loss of the brother who had always been so lenient to her failings, so responsive to her love.

Two years later her own end came at Florence. When she felt the cold hand of death on her, she called feebly for a mirror, that she might look for the last time on her beauty. "Thank God," she whispered, as she gazed, "I am still lovely! I am ready to die." A few moments later, with the mirror still clutched in her hand, and her eyes still feasting on the charms which time and death itself were powerless to dim, died Pauline Bonaparte, sister of an Emperor and herself an Empress by the right of her incomparable beauty.



CHAPTER XI

A SIREN OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

When Wilhelmine Encke first opened her eyes on the world one day in the year 1754, he would have been a bold prophet who would have predicted that she would one day be the uncrowned Queen of the Court of Russia, plus Reine que la Reine, and that her children would have in their veins the proudest blood in Europe. Such a prophecy might well have been laughed to scorn, for little Wilhelmine had as obscure a cradle as almost any infant in all Prussia. Her father was an army bugler, who wore private's uniform in Frederick the Great's army; and her early years were to be spent playing with other soldiers' children in the sordid environment of Berlin barracks.

When her father turned his back on the army, while Wilhelmine was still nursing her dolls, it was to play the humble role of landlord of a small tavern, from which he was lured by the bait of a place as French-horn player in Frederick's private band; and the goal of his modest ambition was reached when he was appointed trumpeter to the King.

This was Herr Encke's position when the curtain rises on our story at Potsdam, and shows us Wilhelmine, an unattractive maid of ten, the Cinderella of her family, for whom there seemed no better prospect than a soldier-husband, if indeed she were lucky enough to capture him. She was, in fact, the "ugly duckling" of a good-looking family, removed by a whole world from her beautiful eldest sister Charlotte, who counted among her many admirers no less exalted a wooer than Prince Frederick William, the King's nephew and heir to his throne.

There was, indeed, no more beautiful or haughty damsel in all Potsdam than this trumpeter's daughter who had caught the amorous fancy of the Prince, then, as to his last day, the slave of every pretty face that crossed his path. But Charlotte Encke was much too imperious a young lady to hold her Royal lover long in fetters. He quickly wearied of her caprices, her petulances, and her exhibitions of temper; and the climax came one day when in a fit of anger she struck her little sister, in his presence, and he took up the cudgels for Wilhelmine.

This was the last straw for the disillusioned and disgusted Prince, who sent Charlotte off to Paris, where as the Countess Matushke she played the fine lady at her lover's cost, while the Prince took her Cinderella sister under his protection. He took her education into his own hands, provided her with masters to teach her a wide range of accomplishments, from languages to dancing and deportment, while he himself gave her lessons in history and geography. Nor did he lack the reward of his benevolent offices; for Wilhelmine, under his ministrations, not only developed rare gifts and graces of mind, like many another Cinderella before her; she blossomed into a rose of girlhood, more beautiful even than her imperious sister, and with a sweetness of character and a winsomeness which Charlotte could never have attained.

On her part, gratitude to her benefactor rapidly grew into love for the handsome and courtly Prince; on his, sympathy for the ill-used Cinderella, into a passion for the lovely maiden hovering on the verge of a still more beautiful womanhood. It was a mutual passion, strong and deep, which now linked the widely contrasted lives of the King-to-be and the trumpeter's daughter—a passion which, with each, was to last as long as life itself.

Wilhelmine was now formally installed in the place of the deposed Charlotte as favourite of the heir to the throne; and idyllic years followed, during which she gave pledges of her love to the man who was her husband in all but name. That her purse was often empty was a matter to smile at; that she had to act as "breadwinner" to her family, and was at times reduced to such straits that she was obliged to pawn some of her small stock of jewellery in order to provide her lover with a supper, was a bagatelle. She was the happiest young woman in Prussia.

Even what seemed to be a crowning disaster, fortune turned into a boon for her. When news of this unlicensed love-making came to the King's ears, he was furious. It was intolerable that the destined ruler of a great and powerful nation should be governed and duped by a woman of the people. He gave his nephew a sound rating—alike for his extravagance and his amour; and packed off Wilhelmine to join her sister in Paris.

But, for once, Frederick found that he had made a mistake. The Prince, robbed of the woman he loved, took the bit in his teeth, and plunged so deeply into extravagant dallying with ballet-dancers and stars of the opera that the King was glad to choose the lesser evil, and to summon Wilhelmine back to her Prince's arms. One stipulation only he made, that she should make her home away from the capital and the dangerous allurements which his nephew found there.

Now at last we find Cinderella happily installed, with the King's august approval, in a beautiful home which has since blossomed into the splendours of Charlottenburg. Here she gave birth to a son, whom Frederick dubbed Count de la Marke in his nurse's arms, but who was fated never to leave his cradle. This child of love, the idol of his parents, sleeps in a splendid mausoleum in the great Protestant Church of Berlin.

As a sop to Prussian morality and to make the old King quite easy, a complaisant husband was now found for the Prince's favourite in his chamberlain, Herr Rietz, son of a palace gardener; and Frederick William himself looked on while the woman he loved, the mother of his children, was converted by a few priestly words into a "respectable married woman"—only to leave the altar on his own arm, his wife in the eyes of the world.

The time was now drawing near when Wilhelmine was to reach the zenith of her adventurous life. One August day in 1786 Frederick the Great drew his last breath in the Potsdam Palace, and his nephew awoke to be greeted by his chamberlain as "Your Majesty." The trumpeter's daughter was at last a Queen, in fact, if not in name, more secure in her husband's love than ever, and with long years of splendour and happiness before her. That his fancy, ever wayward, flitted to other women as fair as herself, did not trouble her a whit. Like Madame de Pompadour, she was prepared even to encourage such rivalry, so long as the first place (and this she knew) in her husband's heart was unassailably her own.

Picture our Cinderella now in all her new splendours, moving as a Queen among her courtiers, receiving the homage of princes and ambassadors as her right, making her voice heard in the Council Chamber, and holding her salon, to which all the great ones of the earth flocked to pay tribute to her beauty and her gifts of mind. It was a strange transformation from the barracks-kitchen to the Queendom of one of the greatest Courts of Europe; but no Queen cradled in a palace ever wore her honours with greater dignity, grace, and simplicity than this daughter of an army bandsman.

The days of the empty purse were, of course, at an end. She had now her ten thousand francs a month for "pin-money," her luxuriously appointed palace at Charlottenburg, and her Berlin mansion, "Unter den Linden," with its private theatre, in which she and her Royal lover, surrounded by their brilliant Court, applauded the greatest actors from Paris and Vienna. It is said that many of these stage-plays were of questionable decency, with more than a suggestion of the garden of Eden in them; but this is an aspersion which Madame de Rietz indignantly repudiates in her "Memoirs."

While Wilhelmine was thus happy in her Court magnificence, varied by days of "delightful repose," at Charlottenburg, France was in the throes of her Revolution, drenched with the blood of her greatest men and fairest women; her King had lost his crown and his head with it; and Europe was in arms against her. When Frederick William joined his army camped on the Rhine bank, Wilhelmine was by his side to counsel him as he wavered between war and peace. The fate of the coalition against France was practically in the hands of the trumpeter's daughter, whose voice was all for peace. "What matters it," she said, "how France is governed? Let her manage her own affairs, and let Europe be saved from the horrors of bloodshed."

In vain did the envoys of Spain and Italy, Austria and England, practise all their diplomacy to place her influence in the scale of war. When Lord Henry Spencer offered her a hundred thousand guineas if she would dissuade her husband from concluding a treaty with France, she turned a deaf ear to all his pleading and arguments. Such influence as she possessed should be exercised in the interests of peace, and thus it was that the vacillating King deserted his allies, and signed the Treaty of Bale, in 1795.

Such was the triumphant issue of Madame Rietz's intervention in the affairs of Europe; such the proof she gave to the world of her conquest of a King. It was thus with a light heart that she turned her back on the Rhine camp; and with her husband's children and a splendid retinue set out on her journey to Italy, to see which was the greatest ambition of her life. At the Austrian Court she was coldly received, it is true, thanks to her part in the Treaty of Bale; but in Italy she was greeted as a Queen. At Naples Queen Caroline received her as a sister; the trumpeter's daughter was the brilliant centre of fetes and banquets and receptions such as might have gratified the vanity of an Empress: while at Florence she spent days of ideal happiness under the blue sky of Italy and among her beauties of Nature and Art.

It was at Venice that she wrote to her King lover, "Your Majesty knows well that, for myself, I place no value on the foolish vanities of Court etiquette; but I am placed in an awkward position by my daughter being raised to the rank of Countess, while I am still in the lowly position of a bourgeoise." She had, in fact, always declined the honour of a title, which Frederick William had so often begged her to accept; and it was only for her daughter's sake, when the question of an alliance between the young Countess de la Marke and Lord Bristol's heir arose, that she at last stooped to ask for what she had so long refused.

A few weeks later her brother, the King's equerry, placed in her hands the patent which made her Countess Lichtenau, with the right to bear on her shield of arms the Prussian eagle and the Royal crown.

Wherever the Countess (as we must now call her) went on her Italian tour she drew men to her feet by the magnetism of her beauty, who would have paid no homage to her as chere amie of a King; for she was now in the early thirties, in the full bloom of the loveliness that had its obscure budding in the Potsdam barrack-rooms. Young and old were equally powerless to resist her fascinations. She had, indeed, no more ardent slave and admirer than my Lord Bristol, the octogenarian Bishop of Londonderry, whose passion for the Countess, young enough to be his granddaughter, was that of a lovesick youth.

From "dear Countess and adorable friend," he quickly leaps in his letters to "my dear Wilhelmine." He looks forward with the impatience of a boy to seeing her at "that terrestrial paradise which is called Naples, where we shall enjoy perpetual spring and spend delightful days in listening to the divine Paesiello. Do you know," he adds, "I passed two hours of real delight this morning in simply contemplating your elegant bedroom where only the elegant sleeper was missing."

"It is in Crocelle," he writes a little later, "that you will make people happy by your presence, and where you will recuperate your health, regain your gaiety, and forget an Irishman; and a holy Bishop, more worthy of your affection, on account of the deep attachment he has for you, will take his place."

In June, 1796, this senile lover writes, "In an hour I depart for Germany; and, as the wind is north, with every step I take I shall say: 'This breeze comes perhaps from her; it has touched her rosy lips and mingled its scent with the perfume of her breath which I shall inhale, the perfume of the breath of my dear Wilhelmine.'"

But these days of dallying with her legion of lovers, of regal fetes and pleasure-chasing, were brought to an abrupt conclusion when news came to her at Venice that her "husband," the King, was dying, with the Royal family by his bedside awaiting the end. Such news, with all its import of sorrow and tragedy, set the Countess racing across the Continent, fast as horses could carry her, to the side of her beloved King, whom she found, if not in extremis, "very dangerously ill and pitifully changed" from the robust man she had left. Her return, however, did more for him than all the skill of his doctors. It gave him a new lease of life, in which her presence brought happiness into days which, none knew better than himself, were numbered.

For more than a year the Countess was his tender nurse and constant companion, ministering to his comfort and arranging plays and tableaux for his entertainment. She watched over him as jealously as any mother over her dying child; but all her devotion could not stay the steps of death, which every day brought nearer. As the inevitable end approached, her friends warned her to leave Charlottenburg while the opportunity was still hers—to escape with her jewels and her money (a fortune of L150,000)—but to all such urging she was deaf. She would stay by her lover's side to the last, though she well knew the danger of delay.

One November day in 1797 Frederick William made his last public appearance at a banquet, with the Countess at his right hand; and seldom has festival had such a setting in tragedy. "None of the guests," we are told, "uttered a word or ate a mouthful of anything; the plates were cleared at the hasty ringing of a bell. A convulsive movement made by the sick man showed that he was suffering agonies. Before half-past nine every guest had left, greatly troubled. The majority of those who had been present never saw the unfortunate monarch again. They all shared the same presentiment of disaster, and wept."

From that night the King was dead, even to his own Court. The gates of his palace were closed against the world, and none were allowed to approach the chamber in which his life was ebbing away, save the Countess, his nurse, and his doctors. Even his children were refused admittance to his presence. As the Marquis de Saint Mexent said, "The King of Prussia ends his days as though he were a rich benefactor. All the relations are excluded by the housekeeper."

A few days before the end came the Countess was seen to leave the palace, carrying a large red portfolio—a suspicious circumstance which the Crown Prince's spies promptly reported to their master. There could be only one inference—she had been caught in the act of stealing State papers, a crime for which she would have to pay a heavy price as soon as her protector was no more! As a matter of fact the portfolio contained nothing more secret or valuable than the letters she had written to the King during the twenty-seven years of their romance, letters which, after reading, she consigned to the flames in her boudoir within an hour of the suspected theft of State documents.

A few days later, on the night of the 16th of November (1797), the King entered on his "death agony," one fit of suffocation succeeding another, until the Countess, unable to bear any longer the sight of such suffering, was carried away in violent convulsions. She saw him no more; for by seven o'clock in the morning Frederick William had found release from his agony in death, and his son had begun to reign in his stead.

At last the long-delayed hour of revenge had come to Frederick William III., who had always regarded his father's favourite as an enemy; and his vengeance was swift to strike. Before the late King's body was cold, his successor's emissaries appeared at the palace door, Unter den Linden, with orders to search her papers and to demand the keys of every desk and cupboard. Even then she scorned to fly before the storm which she knew was breaking. For three days and nights her carriage stood at her gates ready to take her away to safety; but she refused to move a step.

Then one morning, before she had left her bed, a major of the guards, with a posse of soldiers, appeared at her bedroom door armed with a warrant for her arrest; and for many weeks she was a closely guarded prisoner in her own house, subject to daily insults and indignities from men who, a few weeks earlier, had saluted her as a Queen.

At the trial which followed some very grave indictments were preferred against her. She was charged with having betrayed State secrets; with having robbed the Royal Exchequer; stolen the King's portfolio; and removed the priceless solitaire diamond from his crown, and the very rings from his fingers as he lay dying. To these and other equally grave charges the Countess gave a dignified denial, which the evidence she was able to produce supported. The diamond and the rings were, in fact, discovered in places indicated by her where they had been put, by the King's orders, for safe custody.

The trial had a happier ending than, from the malignity of her enemies, especially of the King, might have been expected. After three months of durance she was removed to a Silesian fortress. Her houses and lands were taken from her; but her furniture and jewels were left untouched, and with them she was allowed to enjoy a pension of four thousand thalers a year. Such was the judgment of a Court which proved more merciful than she had perhaps a right to expect. And two months later, the influence and pleading of her friends set her free from her fortress-prison to spend her life where and as she would.

The sun of her splendour had indeed set, but many years of peaceful and not unhappy life remained for our ex-Queen, who was still in the prime of her womanhood and beauty and with the magnetism that, to her last day, brought men to her feet. At fifty she was able to inspire such passion in the breast of a young artist, Francis Holbein, that he asked and won her hand in marriage. But this romance was short-lived, for within a year he left her, to spend the remainder of her days in Paris, Vienna, and her native Prussia. Here her adventurous career closed in such obscurity, at the age of sixty-eight, that even those who ministered to her last moments were unaware that the dying woman was the Countess who had played so dazzling a part a generation earlier, as favourite of the King of Prussia and Queen of her loveliest women.



CHAPTER XII

THE CORSICAN AND THE CREOLE

Of the many women who succeeded one another with such bewildering rapidity in the favour of the first Napoleon, from Desiree Clary, daughter of the Marseilles silk-merchant, the "little wife" of his days of obscurity, to Madame Walewska, the beautiful Pole, who so fruitlessly bartered her charms for her country's salvation, only one really captured his fickle heart—Josephine de Beauharnais, the woman whom he raised to the splendour of an Imperial crown, only to fling her aside when she no longer served the purposes of his ambition.

It was one October day in the year 1795 that Josephine, Vicomtesse de Beauharnais, first cast the spell of her beauty on the "ugly little Corsican," who had then got his foot well planted on the ladder, at the summit of which was his crown of empire. At twenty-six, the man who, but a little earlier, was an out-of-work captain, eating his heart out in a Marseilles slum, was General-in-Chief of the armies of France, with the disarmed rebels of Paris grovelling at his feet.

One day a handsome boy came to him, craving permission to retain the sword his father had won, a favour which the General, pleased by the boy's frankness and manliness, granted. The next day the young rebel's mother presented herself to thank him with gracious words for his kindness to her son—a creature of another world than his, with a beauty, grace and refinement which were a new revelation to his bourgeois eyes.

The fair vision haunted him; the music of her voice lingered in his ears. He must see her again. And, before another day had passed, we find the pale-faced, grim Corsican, with the burning eyes, sitting awkwardly on a horse-hair chair of Madame's dining-room in her small house in the Rue Chantereine, nervously awaiting the entry of the Vicomtesse who had already played such havoc with his peace of mind. And when at last she made her appearance, few would have recognised in the man, who made his shy, awkward bow, the famous General with whose name the whole of France was ringing.

It was little wonder, perhaps, that the little Corsican's heart went pit-a-pat, or that his knees trembled under him, for the lady whose smile and the touch of whose hand sent a thrill through him, was indeed, to quote his own words, "beautiful as a dream." From the chestnut hair which rippled over her small, proudly poised head to the arch of her tiny, dainty feet, "made for homage and for kisses," she was, "all glorious without." There was witchery in every part of her—in the rich colour that mantled in her cheeks; the sweet brown eyes that looked out between long-fringed eyelids; the small, delicate nose; "the nostrils quivering at the least emotion"; the exquisite lines of the tall, supple figure, instinct with grace in every moment; and, above all, in the seductive music of a voice, every note of which was a caress.

Sixteen years earlier, Josephine had come from Martinique to Paris as bride of the Vicomte de Beauharnais, with whom she had led a more or less unhappy life, until the guillotine of the Revolution left her a widow, with two children and an empty purse. But even this crowning calamity was powerless to crush the sunny-hearted Creole, who merely laughed at the load of debts which piled themselves up around her. A little of the wreckage of her husband's fortune had been rescued for her by influential friends; but this had disappeared long before Napoleon crossed her path. And at last the light-hearted widow realised that if she had a card left to play, she must play it quickly.

Here then was her opportunity. The little General was obviously a slave at her feet; he was already a great man, destined to be still greater; and if he was bourgeois to his coarse finger-tips, he could at least serve as a stepping-stone to raise her from poverty and obscurity.

As for Napoleon, he was a vanquished man—and he knew it—before ever he set foot in Madame's modest dining-room. When he left, he "trod on air," for the Vicomtesse had been more than gracious to him. The next day he was drawn as by a magnet to the Rue Chantereine, and the next and the next, each interview with his divinity forging fresh links for the chain that bound him; and at each visit he met under Madame's roof some of the great ones of that other world in which Josephine moved, the old noblesse of France—who paid her the homage due to a Queen.

Thus vanity and ambition fed the flames of the passion which was consuming him; and within a fortnight he had laid his heart and his fortune, which at the time consisted of "his personal wardrobe and his military accoutrements" at the feet of the Creole widow; and one March day in 1796 Napoleon Bonaparte, General, and Josephine de Beauharnais, were made one by a registrar who obligingly described the bride as twenty-nine (thus robbing her of three years), and added two to the bridegroom's twenty-six years.

After two days of rapturous honeymooning Napoleon was on his way to join his army in Italy, as reluctant a bridegroom as ever left Cupid at the bidding of Mars. At every change of horses during the long journey he dispatched letters to the wife he had left behind—letters full of passion and yearning. In one of them he wrote, "When I am tempted to curse my fate, I place my hand on my heart and find your portrait there. As I gaze at it I am filled with a joy unutterable. Life seems to hold no pain, save that of severance from my beloved."

At Nice, amid all the labours and anxieties of organising his rabble army for a campaign, his thoughts are always taking wings to her; her portrait is ever in his hand. He says his prayers before it; and, when once he accidentally broke the glass, he was in an agony of despair and superstitious foreboding. His one cry was, "Come to me! Come to my heart and to my arms. Oh, that you had wings!"

Even when flushed with the surrender of Piedmont after a fortnight's brilliant fighting, in which he had won half a dozen battles and reaped twenty-one standards, he would have bartered all his laurels for a sight of the woman he loved so passionately. But while he was thus yearning for her in distant Italy, Madame was much too happy in her beloved Paris to lend an ear to his pleadings. As wife of the great Napoleon she was a veritable Queen, fawned on and flattered by all the great ones in the capital. Hers was the place of honour at every fete and banquet; the banners her husband had captured were presented to her amid a tumult of acclamation; when she entered a theatre the entire house rose to greet her with cheers. She was thus in no mood to leave her Queendom for the arms of her husband, whose unattractive person and clumsy ardour only repelled her.

When his letters calling her to him became more and more imperative, she could no longer ignore them. But she could, at least, invent an excellent excuse for her tarrying. She wrote to tell him that she was expecting to become a mother. This at least would put a stop to his importunity. And it did. Napoleon was full of delight—and self-reproach at the joyful news. "Forgive me, my beloved," he wrote. "How can I ever atone? You were ill and I accused you of lingering in Paris. My love robs me of my reason, and I shall never regain it.... A child, sweet as its mother, is soon to lie in your arms. Oh! that I could be with you, even if only for one day!"

To his brother Joseph he writes in a similar strain: "The thought of her illness drives me mad. I long to see her, to hold her in my arms. I love her so madly, I cannot live without her. If she were to die, I should have absolutely nothing left to live for."

When, however, he learns that Madame's illness is not sufficient to interfere with her Paris gaieties, a different mood seizes him. Jealousy and anger take the place of anxious sympathy. He insists that she shall join him—threatens to resign his command if she refuses. Josephine no longer dares to keep up her deception. She must obey. And thus, in a flood of angry tears, we see her starting on her long journey to Italy, in company with her dog, her maid, and a brilliant escort of officers. Arrived at Milan, she was welcomed by Napoleon with open arms; but "after two days of rapture and caresses," he was face to face with the great crisis of Castiglione. His army was in imminent danger of annihilation; his own fate and fortune trembled in the balance. Nothing short of a miracle could save him; and on the third day of his new honeymoon he was back again in the field at grips with fate.