It may be remembered that the origins of the insanity of the Duke’s cousin, King Otto of Bavaria, was due to unfortunate love affair which he took too deeply to heart, and that the first blow to the reason of the late King Ludwig II of Bavaria was given by the Court intrigue which brought about the breaking off of his engagement to his cousin, Duchess Sophie in Bavaria, on the eve of the date appointed for the wedding. King Ludwig, after being placed under restraint as a lunatic, died a violent death in the waters of Lake Starnberg in 1886, while his former fiancée, after a far from happy marriage with the French Duke of Alençon, perished in the flames of the charity bazaar conflagration at Paris in 1897.
