Rulers of Kings by Gertrude Atherton

The Princess Sarolta was obscuring the moon with the smoke-clouds of her big black cigar. It was nine o'clock -- dinner in the Királyi Palota was now served at half-past seven -- and the court could smoke behind the pillars and the vines of the long stone terrace beneath the west windows of the private apartments of the King without consideration of possible field-glasses on the heights above. The Princess, who normally resembled a mummy, looked more like a witch in her encircling fumes, and her eyes glittered and blinked behind the red disk of her cigar. They were black eyes, and their fires in youth, and indeed long after Nature had given her more than one admonishing nip and claw, had recklessly leaped to so many other combustible hearts that even now the court gossips disentangled the pulsing tales of her past from others more commonplace.

But with wrinkles and man's manifest preference for her conversation had come not only reform but the evolution of a severe and uncompromising code of morals. She astonished Vienna for a number of years by the vehemence of her criticisms and her treatment of certain noble dames whose fires were still unquenched, or who found in intrigue that taste of liberty which knocks alluringly upon even the doors of Austria. With the mellowness of approaching age the enthusiasm of the Princess had tempered somewhat, and it was observed that she grinned behind her big cigar when an after-dinner scandal exhaled a faint perfume of novelty; but by this time her fame as a she-dragon was securely established.