232
mangled remains, through the
windy night with a pale moon;
the police allowed only a moment
for the burial, and no time at all
to say a prayer.
On another level we can find
more subtle points of contact be–
tween the book and poem. I know
few autobiographies that encom–
pass so many violent deaths-no–
tably death by drowning and death
by fire. And, as we might expect,
there was considerable superstition
and fortune-telling in the Haps–
burg wasteland. The most note–
worthy "death-by-drowning" epi–
sode concerns the suicide of the
Bavarian king in the Starnberger–
See. Of all her relatives, it
was
to
Ludwig that the imaginative Em–
press always felt most closely
drawn. A striking chapter gives
Elizabeth's account of his reap–
pearance several nights after his
death, and the apparition she al–
ways insisted was not at all in a
dream. She was awakened by the
drip-drip of water in her room,
and saw Ludwig standing by her
bed, his hair and clothes drenched
and hung with sea-weed. He fore–
told that her sister (who had been
his fiancee) would join
him
before
long, and already he saw her sur–
rounded by flames and smoke. She
was later burnt to death at the
Bazar de la Charite fire in Paris.
And he added
that
she
herself
would follow, after a death that
would be "short and painless." The
Empress was assassinated the fol-
PARTISAN REVIEW
lowing year, while boarding a
steamer on Lac Leman ("by the
waters of Leman I sat down and
wept")
.2
As I seem to have intruded into
these pages
in
the guise of detec–
tive, I have no business to be re–
viewing a forty-year-old book. But
I find it difficult to close without
paying homage to some of the
more preposterous characters who
accompany the narrative. My fa–
vorite was an Archduchess who
thought she'd swallowed a sofa
which had become permanently
lodged in her head, and she re–
fused to leave her room for fear
that the ends would stick in the
door-jambs. A quick-witted attend–
ant performed a miraculous cure,
by gaining admission to one of
Her Highness' frequent bilious at–
tacks, and slipping a doll's sofa in–
to the basin. And in more serious
vein, there was the noble Archduke
John of Tuscany, whom Marie
links with Rudolph in a plot to
overthrow Franz-Joseph and to
build a democratic Hungary. She
hints that its failure was the real
motive behind Rudolph's suicide.
John of Tuscany was drowned in
a shipwreck off Cape Horn.
It will be understood, I hope,
that there has been no intent here
to detract from the formidable
merits of Eliot's work. On the con-
2 Eliot commentators have ascribed
the curious Lac Leman reference vari–
ously, from the League of Nations to
a medieval word for "lover."
