Nobody, even the best-intentioned, can deny that Emperor William has many faults; those are, however, either ignored altogether, or else exaggerated to an extent that eclipses all his good qualities, by his various biographers.  Very few pen-portraits of royal personages that pass through the hands of the publishers can be said to present a true picture of their subject.  Either the writer holds up the object of his literary effort as a person so blameless as to suggest the idea that he is an impossible prig, or else every piece of malevolent gossip is construed into a positive fact, his shortcomings magnified until they lose all touch of resemblance, while every word and action capable of misrepresentation is construed in the manner most detrimental to his reputation.  In one word, he is either glorified as a preposterous saint, or else held up to public execration as an equally impossible villain.  Now, in pictorial art, a portrait, in order to present a satisfactory and successful resemblance to its subject, must contain lights and shadows.  You cannot have all light, or all shadow, but it is necessary to have a judicious mixture of both.  So it is with the art of biography.  If one wishes to give in print a true, and above all, a human picture of one’s subject, it is necessary to mingle the shadows with the lights.  In fact, the former may be said to set off the latter, and there are many shortcomings, especially those which the French, so graphically describe as petits vices,—­small vices—­which, resulting from a generous and impulsive temperament, serve, like the Rembrandt shadow of a portrait, to render the subject more attractive to the eye.

It is my object, not to give a definitive biography of either of the two kaisers, or even a mere record of their vie intime, but rather to present to my readers a series of incidents, full of lights and full of shadows, showing their surroundings, describing as far as possible the atmosphere in which they move, the conditions of life which they are obliged to consider, the temptations to which they are exposed—­and to which they sometimes succumb—­and when I have completed my task I venture to believe that the readers of these volumes, while they may find the two emperors neither quite so blameless, nor yet quite so bad as they expected, may nevertheless experience a greater degree of sympathy and regard for them as being after all so extremely human.

CHAPTER II

While Emperor Francis-Joseph is justly reputed to have played sad havoc with the hearts of the fair sex in his dominions, especially in his younger days, having inherited that frivolity with regard to women which is a traditional characteristic of the illustrious House of Hapsburg, he has never at any moment during his long reign permitted his susceptibility to feminine charms to go to the length of influencing his political conduct, or the action of his government.