emperor. But for
this very reason the empress began silently to cherish fresh hope.
Nothing had been said yet: the humiliating secret existed only between
her son and herself. Humiliating, because what public reason could he
allege for resigning the succession? What pretext would sound plausible
enough to conceal the true motive of weakness and impotence? And yet he
was her child and Oscar's! It seemed to the empress unfeasible to
communicate Othomar's wish to his father and to tell the emperor that
his own son had no capacity for government. Oh, what sacrifice would she
not be prepared to make, if only she could spare her child this
humiliation! But was he really so powerless to master himself and to
draw himself up, proudly, under the weight of what was as yet no more
than a prince's coronet? Had she but known how to counteract his
discouragement; but she had merely sobbed, merely given way before his
despair; in vain had she sought in his soul the secret spring that
should cause him to rise from the impotence into which the languor of
his reflections had made him sink.... And yet she felt that there must
be a secret spring, because she instinctively divined its presence in
the souls of all her equals: it was the mystery of their sovereignty,
the reason why they were sovereigns, the reason of their prerogative.
She possessed the adorable, child-like faith that in them, the crowned
heads, there exists a common essence of distinction which raises them
above the crowd: that single drop of sacred blood in their veins, that
single atom of inherited divinity, which sheds lustre through their
souls. She believed in their high exclusive right of majesty. Because
she believed in that even as she believed in her sinfulness as a human
being and in the absolution of her confessor, the Archbishop of Lipara,
she could never for one instant doubt their right divine as rulers.
Whatever people might think, or write, or want different, theirs was the
right: of this she was certain, as certain as of the Trinity. That
Othomar had doubted the existence of God had struck her as impious, but
it had not shattered her so much as his disbelief in their right. Was he
alone then lacking in that essence of distinction, that sacred golden
drop of blood, that divine atom? And, if he lacked it, if he, the
crown-prince, lacked majesty, was this monstrous lack her fault, the
fault of the mother who bore him?

The suspicion of this guilt crushed her; a