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[beginning of page] 2. and soldiering rather than in art.

       He knew that the family lawyer of the Bourbon

Parme had great influence over Elias, and he also knew that a friend of his own, named Mr. Z was on very intimate terms with the lawyer, and that furthermore Z was a very shrewd man of business. He accordingly put himself in Z's hands and explained the whole situation to him. Z saw the possibility of making some money for himself and for X and came to me in Paris with a photograph of the picture and told me the story which seemed to me to hang well together. I therefore went with him to Vienna, where the picture then was, and we were there about a month, in which time, to make a long story short, we induced the lawyer to come to our way of thinking and to advise the Prince to sell the picture.

       The arguments in favor of the sale were as follows: 

When Duc Robert, Elias' father, died in 1907, he left a very large family, several of whom were idiots. Although he left a fair sized fortune, there was not much left for the children individually, when it had all been equally divided among them according to Continental law. It was finally agreed that Elias was the only one of them who could afford to take the picture, as he had come in to a large fortune from his wife, an Austrian Archduchess. It was finally arranged that he should take the picture instead of 1,000,000 francs cash, which would have been his inheritance, and the money was to go to his brothers and sisters. The lawyer therefore could quite reasonably argue that here was the chance to realize on the picture, which he had only taken as a favor to his [end of page]