The Danube is not blue, as Karl Isidore Beck calls it in the lines which suggested to Strauss the fetching, mendacious title of his waltz. The Danube is blond, 'a szoke Duna', as the Hungarians say, but even that 'blond' is a Magyar gallantry, or a French one, since in 1904 Gaston Lavergnolle called it More down to earth, Jules Verne thought of entitling a novel Muddy yellow is the water that grows murky at the bottom of these [the Strudlhof] steps.