by Henry W. Fisher

Munsey's Magazine, October 1895

     "In our century of prose and reality love has for once manifested its power despite all opposition. It is from the land of the sun, from the land of Carmen Sylva, who sings from the heart and soul—it is from Roumania that this ray of light comes," wrote Queen Elizabeth in the summer of 1891, while her kingdom trembled with the excitement caused by the Vacaresco incident. "Prince Ferdinand and Helène," she continued, stand before us a precious example of valiant love, braving the thousand storms raised by the shadow of that crown which hovers over the young man's head. The Roumanians will applaud their union, and all truly patriotic hearts will beat with joy when the happy couple plight their troth at the altar."
     Today the poet queen, resting among the verdure clad mountains of Sinaia at the picturesque castle of Pelesh, in harmony with her husband and people, surrounded by friends, respected and honored by the great dignitaries of state, blushes as she recalls these pages from her diary. Her romantic friendship for her former maid of honor, which was ended by the king's order despite Elizabeth's hysteric protests and impotent threats-this fanciful attachment that came near wrecking her throne, proved to be a one sided, sentimental illusion, as her majesty is now well aware. The gentle Helène was long ago unmasked as an adventuress, and the lovelorn Ferdinand has for two years been the contented husband of another woman.
     Three summers ago, the most sanguine observer would not have dared anticipate so happy and prosaic a solution of the imbroglio that set the war ministers of all Europe to overhaul their marching orders. The writer, at the time, was a foreign correspondent stationed in Vienna, and the passage just quoted from the queen's diary was among the choice bits of gossip that reached his office from her majesty's "cabinet" in Bucharest, the communications being invariably signed "Schaeffer, Her Majesty's Secretary."
     They say journalists are born, like strategic and poetic geniuses. Bismarck is of opinion that they are men who have missed their proper vocation. Both maxims fit the case of Schaeffer. A journalist by the grace of nature, he became amanuensis to a royal mistress who dealt in anything but facts.
     I have read through several of Carmen Sylva's romances, but none of them—nor even her majesty's translation of the "Songs of the Dimbovitza," gathered by Helene Vacaresco among the gipsies—wild and unreal as they are, can compare, as works of untrammeled imagination, with the version of the Vacaresco affair sent out by the Queen's secretary on official, crowned, and crest laden paper. It was all in the general key of the queen's diary effusions-unbridled, rhapsodical, of childlike artlessness, presupposing a state of the public mind which hardly existed in the days of the troubadours. Denuded of highfalutin phrases, endless periods, fulsome declarations, hysterics and hyperbole, the queen's typewritten statements were to the effect that her nephew, Prince Ferdinand, heir presumptive to the crown of Roumania, had fallen desperately in love with the young and innocent Helène Vacaresco, who was a lady of the court of Bucharest, a renowned poetess, and daughter of a noble family; that she—Carmen Sylva—had permitted the couple to become engaged; that they were man and wife before God's altar, and that the people of Roumania were eager to hail Helène as their future queen.
     Photographs exhibiting the queen, Prince Ferdinand, and Helène, posed together in a loving group, were inclosed, and the sympathies of the correspondents enlisted on the plea of chivalry.
     Of course, when a queen—and, forsooth, a lovely woman—unbends to ask favors of a handful of journalists in a foreign country, the readers whom they serve are liable to become her majesty's converts. Oh, the wonderful romances concerning the royal trio we telegraphed and cabled to all parts