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the gallery she sells the work of other local painters as well as her own, and that of a talented créole sculptor who earns his living as foreman of a rum distillery.
    St Paul is full of artists. The majority of them are pretty bad. The ones Elizabeth sells most of are a woman flower-painter with a hibiscus fixation and a garage mechanic who does oil-on-board daubs of island beauty spots. He uses a contraption made up in the garage to spray sand on his paint while it is still wet. The process serves both to conceal, at least partially, his banal incompetence and to impart theillusion of an original technique. His work is much in demand during the tourist season (an American airline magazine called him ‘the Grandma Moses of St Paul’) and Elizabeth takes a malicious pleasure in charging high prices for it. The talented sculptor, on the other hand, is hard to sell. However, one or two American galleries, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, now have examples of his work and Elizabeth is trying to get him a one-man show in Paris.
    Her own work is of two kinds: trompe-l’oeil, which sell quite well, and her ‘vowel paintings’, which don’t.
    It was I who coined the term ‘vowel paintings’. She calls them ‘commemorations’. They are large, violent canvases depicting, as if they were human participants in medieval torture sessions, massacres or dances of death, the letters A E I O U.
    To understand them, or at any rate to understand why she goes on producing them, you have first to look at her passport.
    The name she normally uses is Elizabeth Martens. The name in her passport, however, is: Maria Valeria Modena Elizabeth von Hapsburg-Lorraine Martens Duplessis. Martens is her nom-de-jeune-fille. Her father, Jean Baptiste Martens, a Belgian national, owns textile factories near Lille. Duplessis is the name of the French husband from whom she is separated. The rest of that imposing list derives from her mother who is – and Elizabeth has genealogical tables to substantiate the oddity – a great-great-great-granddaughter of the Empress Maria Theresa of Austria.
    Hence, Elizabeth is, through a Spanish branch of the family, a Hapsburg; and A E I O U is an acronym. It was invented by, or for, a fifteenth-century Hapsburg, the Emperor Friedrich III; and the invention was intended to support his belief, justifiably waning at the time, in the ability of his line to endure. A E I O U stands for
Austriae Est Imperare Orbi Universo.
    Elizabeth sees nothing absurd in her obsession with it; and there seems to be no ordinary snobbery in her inability to ignore or forget that part of her genetic heritage and the long, bloody chapters of history it represents. Indeed, her feelings towards this monstrous dynasty which haunts her are decidedly ambivalent. Though in the vowel paintings she is always ridiculing or reviling it – there is a sickening ‘commemoration’ of an imperial funeral at the Kapuziner Crypt – she is also capable of springing to its defence. She has been known to point out fiercely that it was not the British Empire upon which ‘the sun never set’ but the Hapsburg Empire of Charles the Fifth, who ruled ‘from the Carpathians to Peru’. Once, when she had drunk rather too much rum, she startled an inoffensive Boston art dealer and his wife with a sudden passionate appeal for their understanding of the pitiable plight of Charles the Sixth – gout, stomach trouble and disastrous pregnancies. It transpired, but only after some moments of utter confusion, that the pregnancies were those of his Empress and that what Elizabeth was justifying was the Pragmatic Sanction of 1713.
    If this all makes her sound somewhat eccentric I should explain that for most of the time she is reasonably level headed. The locals’ word for her is
toquée
, but on St Paul this is not necessarily a derogatory term. A measure of dottiness is allowable, and if the possessor of it looks like Elizabeth it may even be regarded