The last weeks of his life were a torture to him; each message that I had to deliver he felt as the lash of a whip.

I was enjoined to do all I could to secure Roumania's prompt co-operation, according to the terms of the Alliance, and I was even obliged to go so far as to remind him that "a promise given allows of no prevarication: that a treaty is a treaty, and _his honour_ obliged him to unsheathe his sword." I recollect one particularly painful scene, where the King, weeping bitterly, flung himself across his writing-table and with trembling hands tried to wrench from his neck his order _Pour le Merite_.

I can affirm without any exaggeration that I could see him wasting away under the ceaseless moral blows dealt to him, and that the mental torment he went through undoubtedly shortened his life.
Queen Elizabeth was well aware of all, but she never took my action amiss; she understood that I had to deliver the messages, but that it was not I who composed them.
Queen Elizabeth was a good, clever and touchingly simple woman, not a _poet qui court apres l'esprit_, but a woman who looked at the world through conciliatory and poetical glasses.

She was a good conversationalist, and there was always a poetic charm in all she did.
There hung on the staircase a most beautiful sea picture, which I greatly admired while the Queen talked to me about the sea, about her little villa at Constanza, which, built on the extreme end of the quay, seems almost to lie in the sea.

She spoke, too, of her travels and impressions when on the high seas, and as she spoke the great longing for all that is good and beautiful made itself felt, and this is what she said to me: "The sea lives.