THEIR POVERTY

Timaru Herald, Volume CXXV, Issue 18629, 26 July 1930, Page 11

THEIR POVERTY

WOMEN’S CONTRASTING FATE. The sharply contrasting troubles of two women are revealed below. One woman, the wife of an American millionaire, declares that even with an income of £84,000 a year she will not have a penny for luxuries. The other, a former Crown Princess and heiress to a European throne, is earning a meagre living by teaching in a little school in Brussels.

Is an annual income of £84,000 a year necessary to enable a woman to live without “luxury”? This question has arisen in Chicago, where Mrs. Katherine Dexter M’Cormick has requested Judge Horner to grant her £84,000 a year from the estate of her husband, Mr Stanley M’Cormick, who, for many years, has been confined to his California residence as a mental incompetent. Mrs. M’Cormick’s present income from the estate is £32,000 a year, which, she claims, is so insufficient for her normal needs that she has been compelled to run into debt.

Her request for £84,000 is being resisted by Mr Stanley M’Cormick’s brothers, Harold and Cyrus M’Cormick’, and his sister, Mrs Anita Blaine who however, are willing that Katherine shall have £40,000 a year. Mr M’Cormick’s estate is valued at more than £10,000,000, and is mostly in the stock of the International Harvester Company. It has increased to that figure from £2,000,000, which was estimated to be its value twenty-four years ago, when he was pronounced incompetent. Her lawyer is Mr Newton D. Baker, who was Secretary for War in the late President Wilson’s Cabinet. He told Judge Horner, “Mrs M’Cormick is running into debt trying to live in the way she has been accustomed to.” He deplored that Mrs M’Cormick had asked for “only £84.000 a year,” and added: “That sum will only meet necessary expenses, without including a dollor for luxury.”

Mrs M’Cormick also wants £120,000 for her husband’s estate to pay her immediate creditors, and £16,000 more for new medical and legal fees. Mr Baker informed Judge Horner that he would demand £IOO,OOO for his own legal service to Mrs M’Cormick since 1927.

Judge Horner said that he believed that the increase in Mrs M’Cormick’s income was justifiable and he advised the lawyers for both sides to reach an agreement out of court. And the contrast:—

The tragic fate of a woman who, from being heiress to a European throne and one of the most celebrated and most talked-of beauties of her time, is now, at sixty, living alone and forgotten in a small suburban villa eking out a meagre existence by giving lessons to children, has just been revealed in Berlin.

The woman is Louise Antoinette of Tuscany, former Crown Princess of Saxony. The ex-Crown Princess school teacher wears none of her high-sound-ing titles now. To the parents of the children who attend her little class in a Brussels suburb she is known as the Comtesse d’Ysette.

The Comtesse, who is still remarkably beautiful despite her age , is working on a volume of memoirs.

The rancour with which her influential German enemies persecuted her led to the princess, while living in Brussels during the war, being subjected to greater indignity and having more difficulties placed in her way than the ordinary citizens of Brussels. She was not allowed to pass outside the narrow confines of her suburb, a privilege which was granted without difficulty to almost any Belgian who cared to apply for it. The authorities, knowing the remarkably liberal views of the princess, were afraid of indiscretion and revelations which she might make. Princess Louise was the daughter of Ferdinand IV., Grand Duke of Tuscany, and she married the Crown Prince of Saxony in 1891.

About ten years later she eloped with a man named Giron, who was her children’s tutor. After her husband had divorced her. she married Signor Toselli, a musician, from whom she later separated. The princess in 1911 published her autobiography, which was called “My Own Life,” and which made such a sensation that the King of Saxony, her former husband, tried to have her placed under restraint.