The Democratic press. [volume] (Ravenna, O. [Ohio]) 1868-1901, 1895-01-02
ONE woMAN's SECRET OF BEAUTY.
Bathed In the Blood of Maidens, for Which
Hundreds Were Put to Death.

Paris has just been edited by work
treating of the life and proceedings of q
lady of the sixteenth century who car
ried her care for her beauty to the very
utmost limit, says the Philadelphia Tele-
graph. This is not fairy tale, but a
sober, historical fact, backed by many
official documents of authenticity and
the lady's amiable weakness is described
with wealth of detail and forcible SIM
plicity of description that is apt to turn
the reader sick.
The lady in question was named
Elizabeth Bathoory, Countesse Nadas-
dy, who married at the age of Is, in
1896, Comte Francois Nadasdy. who
was not of too mild nature himself.
as, when his wife complained one day
that her maid had been impertinent, he
ordered the erring handmaiden stripped,
smeared with honey and laid on a
wasps' nest, from the effects of which
gentle admonition she subsequently
died.
The Countess Elizabeth was left a
widow in 1904 and began simply at first
to try to keep up the rigorous discipline
enforced by her late husband. Unhap-
PLY, one day she struck her waiting
maid and so wounded her that her mis-
tress' hands were covered with blood.
When they were washed the countess
remarked that her hands were whittier
and the skin more supple and firm and
thenceforward her naturally cruel ma
ture was spurred by the frenzied desire
to retain her waning beauty at any
price.
Odd though it may seem in the pres
ent day, she used as a cosmetic from
that time on bath of human blood, and
the tradition goes that anything so su-
perb in its brilliant fairness as her COM
plexion cannot be imagined. She MUIR
dered all her waiting maids, one by
one, aided by three accomplices, her old
nurse being one of them, and when she
could get no women to enter her service
she coolly sent her emissaries to kidnap
the peasant girls of the neighborhood.
At last, however, the CHASTITY scandal
rose to such pitch that even Hungary
in the middle age could not afford to
close its ears to the wall of bereaved
families and the culprit's first cousin,
governor of, the province, entered the
castle on Christmas eve, 1910, to in
quire into the truth of these horrible
stories and discovered his fair and hon.
ored relative, her fair chin propped by
her exquisite hand, calmly watching
the death agonies of three girls, while
her attendants were filing bath with
the life blood that was to preserve hel
beauty.
The countess herself was too great
a parsonage to incur capital punish
ment, but for thirty years she was shut
up in solitary confinement in the castle
of Cseibhe. in Hungary, where she
finally starved herself to death. As fol
her accomplices, they had their hands
cut of and were subsequently burned
at the stake, as being common people
1t is said that this fair dame sacrificed
600 girls to her radiance of skin. but the
biographer states soberly that docu
mentary evidence exists of the murder
of only $50. Whether in after year.
she considered thirty years of solitary
confinement too high price to pay fol
six years of unimpaired beauty it il
hard to say, but the inference is thai
she did. since she killed herself