The story goes that Elizabeth refused to believe that he was mad, and, after vainly imploring Francis Joseph to insist upon his release, engaged in a plot to rescue him. The King was to dive into the lake, and swim across it, and a carriage, with swift horses, ready harnessed, was to be waiting to carry him far away from his keepers to a place of safety. It sounds like a story built on a foundation of careless emotional talk; and the end, at any rate, came differently, and somewhat mysteriously. Ludwig persuaded his doctor to send the keepers away, declaring that their presence worried him; and the doctor was a muscular man who believed that he could trust himself to cope with any emergency. Strong as he was, however, Ludwig was still stronger; and when the keepers returned, they found that both the King and the physician had been drowned, after a struggle, of which there was abundant evidence. Whether the King had murdered his physician, in order that he might be free to escape, or the physician had perished in attempting to frustrate the King’s attempt at suicide, remains to this hour uncertain.

There is a further story to the effect that the Empress Elizabeth saw the tragedy in a dream, and awoke, screaming, to learn that her dream was a true vision; but though the dream itself is well accredited, one may suspect that legend has taken a liberty with the date. There is something characteristic, however, and therefore probably true, in the report of the words which the Empress is declared to have spoken as she bent over her cousin’s corpse:

The conception of life as a torture which must be stoically endured had, by that time, grown upon the Empress; and there were still other trials in store for her, which were to confirm it, even before the tragic day on which her sister was to meet her death in the fire at the Bazaar de la Charité at Paris. There was to be another suicide in the family, that of the Comte de Trani, at Geneva. The Archduke Joseph’s son, Archduke Ladislas, was to be killed, accidentally, while shooting. The Archduchess Elizabeth, daughter of the Archduke Albert, and granddaughter of the Archduke Charles, who had fought so well against Napoleon, was to perish in a still more tragic accident.

She was in her ball-dress of lace and muslin, leaning out of one of the windows at Schönnbrunn, smoking a cigarette. It was a forbidden pleasure; and hearing her father’s footstep, she made haste to hide the cigarette, first covering it with her hand, and placing it behind her. The Archduke stopped to talk to her, and a moment later the ball-dress was in flames. He could not reach her, and so could do nothing to help her. She ran, shrieking, down the corridor, and the draught fanned the flames. Before they could be extinguished, she was burnt almost to death; and though they placed her in a bath of oil, and took her to Vienna, the best physicians could do nothing for her, and she died in agony a few days later.

There we have another example of the poignant sorrows to which Francis Joseph has been condemned through the sufferings of members of his family; and now we come to the greatest tragedy of all—the tragedy which was to deprive him of his only son, the Crown Prince Rudolph.