THE STORY OF MY LIFE (VOL. II) By Marie Queen
of Roumania From 1893, when she was married to the Crown Prince of Roumania, to 1914, the year of his accession, this second volume (Cassell, 18s.) continues Queen Marie's story, abundantly confirming the impression that the dowager Queen of Roumania is by far the most vivacious of royal chroniclers. As told in her first volume, she had enjoyed an English girlhood, and at seventeen she was transplanted to Bucharest, where for twenty years she lived under the crushing authority of the first King Carol, a German martinet of unsurpassed rigidity and absurdity. The Princess, on the whole, seems to have done as well as any young woman could, and it says a good deal for her disposition that she is able to write of the old tyrant with affection. The energetic literary Queen, Carmen Sylva, is the most entertaining character in the book. There are bright sketches of life at the Court of Bucharest and at the country retreats of the family, stories of gaiety achieved under tremendous difficulties, and portraits of Roumanian aristocrats and politicians down to the Balkan Wars which preluded the European overturn. Queen Marie's memory is extraordinarily vivid and detailed. She writes with unflagging zest, and with an almost entire absence of the sentimentality that has for so long been accepted as the proper tone for a popular book about royalty.
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