Memories of the Kaiser's Court

MEMORIES OF THE KAISER’S COURT



BY ANNE TOPHAM WITH EIGHT ILLUSTRATIONS SEVENTH AND CHEAPER EDITION METHUEN & CO. LTD. 36 ESSEX STREET W.C. LONDON
This Edition, at 2s. 6d. net, First Published in 1915

TOWARDS the middle of August 1902, on a very hot, dusty, suffocating day, I was travelling, the prey of various apprehensions, to the town of Homburg-vor-der-Höhe, where the Prussian Court was at that time in temporary residence.
Thither I had been summoned, to join it in the capacity of resident English teacher to the young nine-year-old Princess Victoria Louise of Prussia, only daughter of the German Emperor and Empress.
A stormy night-passage of eight hours on the North Sea, followed by a long train-journey through stifling heat lasting till five o’clock in the afternoon, naturally affects any one’s spiritual buoyancy, and it was with a distinct feeling of depression that I at last descended from the train on to the platform of Homburg station.
I confidently expected that a carriage would be waiting for me, but nothing in the least resembling a royal equipage is to be seen. There is only a row of those shabby, time-worn, open droschkies, harnessed to attenuated, weary-looking horses, which, even since the advent of the “taxi” into the social conditions of the Fatherland, still maintain a precarious, struggling existence in most German towns.
I am a helpless stranger, with a very limited knowledge of the German language as applied to porters and cabmen, and consequently very much at the mercy of these functionaries.