for I am only a human being like yourselves and no more human than
you." Are you more human? If you were more, then you would be entitled
to rule, yes, then, then.... See here, young man, you will never have so
much love for your people as to do all this, oh, and more still and
more! You will govern and possess abundance and wage war. But the time
will come! Therefore I have pity for you ... although I oughtn't to!'"_

The dead weight of inheritance, always a psychological fascination for
Couperus, becomes doubly fascinating when one generation after another
inherits an undwindling legacy of divine, ironic whim. As, in _The Books
of the Small Souls_ and in _Old People and the Things that Pass_, the
children and grandchildren are born with minds tainted by prenatal
memories, so, in _Majesty_, a prenatal influence has ordered the life
and determined the fate of an infant who first draws breath as Count of
Lycilia, eldest son of the Duke of Xara, himself crown-prince and eldest
son of the Emperor of Liparia. There is no escape, no lack of heirs to
the ironic inheritance: _"'If it's a son,'"_ says the empress mother, on
the morrow of her husband's assassination, _"'it will be a Duke of
Xara....'_

_"And then the Emperor of Liparia ... lost his self-restraint. In one
lightning-flash, one zig-zag of terror, he saw again his life as
crown-prince, he thought of his unborn son. What would become of this
child of fate? Would it be a repetition of himself, of his hesitation,
his melancholy and his despair?..."_

If _Majesty_ be a _roman a clef_, "this child of fate," with his father
and mother and sisters, had his short spell of hesitation, melancholy
and despair ended in 1918 by the revolver-shots of his gaolers. If
Othomar be not a portrait of the Czar Nicolas II., it is hard to believe
that the character was not suggested by him; though the Czar Alexander
III. died a natural death, he would seem to have supplied a parallel for
the Emperor Oscar, as Alexander II. supplied one for the liberal
emperor, Othomar XI. The fanatical Zanti has his model in Count Tolstoi;
and even the tragic romance of Prince von Lohe-Obkowitz has its
historical counterpart.

But the interest and value of the book do not lie in any fancied
resemblance, among the characters, to living or dead kings; the study of
Prince Othomar does not depend on any likeness to the Czar Nicolas II.;
Couperus succeeds or fails not as a court painter, but as a great
sy