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THE MAKROPOULOS SECRET hundred years. But Emperor Rudolph was afraid it was poison and wanted to try it first on the doctor’s daughter. That was I. I was sixteen then. So Father tried it on me. He called it a “charm,” but it belonged to the devil.

What was it?

I must not say. I lay for a week or longer, beside myself in fever. But I got well.

And the Emperor?

Did nothing. He went mad. How could he be sure that I was going to live for three hundred years? So he put my father in a tower as a fraud and I ran away with everything he had written to Hungary or to Turkey, I don’t remember which.

Did you show the charm to anyone—the Makropoulos secret?

I did. A Tyrolian priest tried it in sixteen-sixty, or thereabouts. Perhaps he is still alive, I don’t know. At one time he was Pope and called himself Alexander, or Pius, or something like that. Then a Statia officer—but he